If I have one complaint about the trailer for Hulu’s Interior Chinatown—the series adaptation created by author Charles Yu—it’s that I worry it is keeping its cards a little too close to the chest. It’s a tough line to walk, hinting at the story’s inventive angles without giving everything away. But what we do see here is perfect.
Interior Chinatown is the story of Willis Wu, and the summary gives a little more context to the delightfully unsettling aspects of the trailer:
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.
The trailer begins by sticking with the seemingly typical—Willis (Jimmy O. Yang) meeting detective Lana Lee (Chloe Bennett) and being drawn into a murder investigation that might involve his brother. But there’s so much more going on—levels hinted at by the more surreal moments that creep into the trailer’s two minutes.
This past summer, Yu spoke a bit about how the show isn’t the book, and there may be some surprises; at a press event, he discussed thinking of the show as inspired by the book, and the effort to “stay true to what made you want to tell this story […] and to make a new story that ultimately is surprising for people, whether or not they read the book.”
Interior Chinatown also stars Ronny Chieng, Lisa Gilroy, Sullivan Jones, Archie Kao, and Diana Lin. Despite the fact that it clearly deserves the prestige-TV weekly release schedule—let us have time to discuss and appreciate! Let the story breathe!—it arrives on Hulu in an all-episode dump on November 19th. The pilot episode is directed by Taika Waititi.
