Jimmy O. Yang in Charles Yu’s Meta Hulu Mystery

A strange irony underlies Hulu’s Chinatown interior. The main character is Willis Wu (Jimmy O. Yang), an unassuming waiter who has always dreamed of being the hero but despairs of being forever relegated to, as he sighs, “a background character in someone else’s story.” Ostensibly, this show represents his chance to change all that – to take control of his own story, to seize his own destiny, to fulfill his own role in a world that’s all too eager to put him in a series. wants to stop stereotypical boxes.

But the only way Chinatown interior Apparently he can achieve that by putting him in yet another box, this time as an avatar for someone else’s cultural analysis. It’s certainly a bigger box, with more room for experimentation and bold self-awareness. But it’s a box nonetheless, prioritizing the neat confines of its own meta-narrative over its unique self.

The cleverness is nice to start with though. “The person in the first scene of a proceeding is either a victim or a witness,” Willis muses to a friend in the opening minutes – and lo and behold, he becomes the latter just minutes later when he sees a woman being kidnapped in a rose. Simultaneously intrigued and intimidated by the feeling that this could be his chance to be part of the action, he reports the incident to Lana Lee (Chloe Bennet), a police officer with whom he is in love. Soon, the unofficial partners are pulling on a thread that stretches all the way back to the unsolved disappearance of Willis’ older brother (Chris Pang) some ten years ago.

The premiere, credited to Yu and directed by Taika Waititi, pulls out all the stops to draw our attention to the fact that Chinatown interior is not just telling a story, but telling a story about the kinds of stories being told. Like WandaVision or Kevin can F himselfit uses the visual language of television to tell the medium about itself.

So Green (Lisa Gilroy) and Turner (Sullivan Jones), the lead detectives on the case, aren’t just arrogant cops – they’re presented here as the stars of a crime procedural called Black and White: Unity for impossible crimes (because he’s black and she’s white, get it?), complete with his own Law and order-like title cards, music cues and mood lighting. When the pair walk into a room, the camera turns inexorably towards them, pushing Willis to the edges of the frame while not removing him entirely.

Elsewhere, there are numerous visual references for everyone from Wong Kar-wai to Bruce Lee. If Willis’ Chinatown looks like a faceless studio backlot dressed up to take the place of every Chinatown in America, then that’s the point. Chinatown interior is fluent in both the tropes that flatten men like Willis and the tropes that make them dream of better, and tickles them with an irreverent sense of humor. In one episode, Willis is blocked from the doors of a police station, as if by an invisible, supernatural force, because he doesn’t belong there. There’s no room in a police procedural for some random Asian guy to just show up and start. digging around. Only when he presents himself as ‘Delivery Guy’ is he let in, after discovering how to use a tired cliché for his own purposes.

But all this self-referentiality only goes a long way to concealing the fact that the central plot is rather thin – and, worse, populated by characters who are only slightly more dimensional than the very archetypes they are meant to challenge. In Yu’s book, a second-person screenplay format helped bridge the gap between the reader and a protagonist who struggles to define herself, sometimes even Unpleasant himself, outside of the assumptions others seemed to have about him: all those ‘you’ forced the audience right into his shoes. The series is unable to achieve a comparable connection. Despite copious (first-person) voiceover to bring us straight into Willis’s mind, he is someone we view from the outside of the screen – and someone who seems defined more by what he is not than by who he really is.

Around the third 40-minute episode (of the five sent to critics, from a ten-part season), the show’s meta-framing feels at odds with its own narrative. Instead of expanding our understanding of this world, it becomes a layer that separates us from characters or stories we might otherwise have come to love on their own terms. Yang comes off quite well in the lead role. He jumps convincingly between light comedy, genuine heroism and even action stardom, complete with his own badass kung fu scene in the premiere. And Ronny Chieng seems to be having more fun than anyone as Fatty, Willis’ wonderfully irresponsible best friend/roommate/coworker. But the specificity of their dynamic remains underexplored in a show that’s generally better equipped to gesture toward emotion than fully embody it.

Moments of fleeting poignancy, as in a subplot about the rocky but essentially caring relationship between Willis’s aging parents, Lily (Diana Lin) and Joe (Tzi Ma), are undermined by a script far more interested in chasing tropes to shatter than in it’s exploration of the unique topography of its characters’ souls. Heck, Lana’s whole will-they-won’t-they with Willis seems built around whether she’s the kind of girl who might be interested in these types of men, and not on what either of these two individuals might bring to each other Pull. . Despite Bennet’s best attempts to lay complicated feelings beneath her character’s cool exterior, Lana’s most notable trait, as of midseason, is the fact that she is coy about her backstory.

The thin character work could be less frustrating if the meta angle felt particularly sharp. But there is a reason Chinatown interior set in an inconsistently established version of the ’90s. The understanding of the role Asians fill in pop culture seems stuck in a time before mainstream ideas of what an “Asian role” might be were expanded by works like Fresh off the boat or Shang-Chi and the Legend of Anything or Crazy rich Asians (which also starred Yang, Chieng and Pang) or Everything everywhere at once – or even ones like The acolyte And Crazy ex-girlfriend which are not necessarily about Asianness, but about Asian characters in non-stereotypical roles.

It is true that old assumptions persist, that there is still room for more varied or more nuanced or simply more screenshots of the Asian American character, that even now (perhaps especially now) we are haunted by the fear that what progress we have also booked could be canceled again. And on a more practical level, I will allow that Chinatown interior may have some new tricks up its sleeve for the second half of the season; a development involving Turner in particular made me wonder if the show’s true ambitions might be bigger and stranger than initially believed.

But it certainly detracts from the effectiveness of a piece of cultural commentary if it seems like it’s responding to circumstances from twenty years ago, rather than engaging with the conversation as it is now. Chinatown interior claims to be a step forward, allowing the Willises of the world to finally have their day in the sun. But so far it’s only gotten as far as turning him into a different kind of symbol. In the first half of the season he is a manifestation of an age-old wound, a face of an ongoing struggle, a glimmer of hope for a better future. It still has a way to go before it finds out what makes it a fully-fledged human being.