Charles Yu‘s National Book Award-winning Interior Chinatown (his second novel after How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe) was written using the screenplay format, and is about a guy who exists as a background actor toiling on the fringes of a cop show. So it was already kind of the perfect project to adapt to the screen—and it looks like Hulu’s new series, which stars Jimmy O. Wang and counts Yu and Taika Waititi among its executive producers, hits just the right tone: starting off as something familiar (a police procedural), then spiraling into offbeat heroic fantasy, stomping all over stereotypes along the way.
The first trailer is here ahead of Interior Chinatown‘s binge drop in November:
Here’s the official synopsis for the series: “Based on Charles Yu’s award-winning book of the same name, the show follows the story of Willis Wu, a background character trapped in a police procedural called Black & White. Relegated to the background, Willis goes through the motions of his on-screen job, waiting tables, dreaming about a world beyond Chinatown and aspiring to be the lead of his own story. When Willis inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, he begins to unravel a criminal web in Chinatown, while discovering his own family’s buried history and what it feels like to be in the spotlight.”
Yang definitely has main-character energy as Willis; the rest of the cast includes the very funny Ronny Chieng (The Daily Show), along with Chloe Bennet (Agents of SHIELD), Lisa Gilroy, Sullivan Jones, Archie Kao, and Diana Lin. Waititi directed the pilot, and you can catch all 10 episodes of Interior Chinatown November 19, when they arrive on Hulu.
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