'Interior Chinatown' review: Jimmy O. Yang comedy is confusing to the brink of baffling

WHAT IT'S ABOUT Willis Wu (Jimmy O. Yang, "Silicon Valley") is a waiter in a police procedural when he witnesses a kidnapping outside the restaurant where he works in New York's Chinatown. He suddenly has an epiphany — what happened to her, and how can he find out? The only problem is that he exists in a script only; he's Waiter Guy, as his friend Fatty Choi (Ronny Chieng, most recently "M3GAN") and his mom Lily (Diana Lin) remind him. But Willis has an interior life, separate from the procedural, and he intends to explore it. The question becomes, will the cop show's stars, homicide cops Sarah Green (Lisa Gilroy) and Miles Turner (Sullivan Jones, Broadway's "Slave Play") let him? Or how about the mysterious new officer who joins the show, Det. Lana Lee (Chloe Bennet, "Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D."). Based on the 2020 National Book Award winner. 

MY SAY All the world's a set in "Interior Chinatown," and not a particularly inclusive or kind one. Everyone has their place, and knows where to hit their mark. The stars are the stars, and the extras are the extras. They have their roles to play, and some of those roles are better than others. But not by much. They're all one-dimensional stereotypes wrapped in '70-90s cop procedural tropes, and when the cameras are off, or the show goes to commercial, they disappear, as if they never existed in the first place. In effect, they never did.

But Willis has dreams — if only the script and show he's entombed in had dreams for him. At first he just wants to become another screen cliché, Kung Fu Guy, then become the cop who breaks the gang that's terrorizing C'Town (the Painted Faces) and find out what happened to his long-lost brother in the process. In the cop show, "Black & White," he's Waiter Guy, or just another Hollywood stereotype about Asians who are sidelined to the margins of the script page and screen.

Obviously there are possibilities here — comic ones, dramatic ones, philosophical ones, and score-settling ones. There are messages to be conveyed, ideas about identity and representation to be explored. And under the heading that you-are-what-you-watch, if you've only been portrayed one way on TV or the movies (if portrayed at all) does that mean you too exist in the real world as a lesser being (or, obviously, much worse) as a nonentity?

The title takes a shot at another threadworm screen trope about Chinatowns, as hotbeds of crime and corruption, captured long ago in the classic line: Forget it, Jake, it's Chinatown.

The novelist who wrote "Interior Chinatown," Charles Yu, also worked as a writer on HBO's "Westworld," which offers a clue about what's going on here. Like "Westworld," the actors exist in a prefabricated world, while some gradually come to realize something weird is going on. They may not have agency but they do have growing awareness. In "Westworld," that's the horror of their predicament; in "Interior Chinatown," it's the comedy — or what passes for comedy.

Yet "Westworld" took 36 episodes to become completely unwatchable, while "Chinatown" manages the feat in considerably fewer. What works in a novel doesn't always work in a series, and this seems like the perfect example. Layer upon layer, idea upon idea, "Chinatown" can be confusing to the brink of baffling. It never explains — for example — why this is a last-century network procedural, or why some characters have a consciousness, and others do not.

But if you must, watch for the little stuff: Some good performances (Chieng, Yang, Bennet), some funny lines, a clever kicker and that compelling premise. A shame all the rest is a mess.

BOTTOM LINE Effective as media criticism, much less so as entertainment