TAlthough Charles Yu’s 2020 National Book Award-winning novel Interior Chinatown is written as a teleplay, it doesn’t fit so naturally on the big screen. Part surreal exploration of identity, part representation of Hollywood’s limited view of Asian Americans, it’s a tricky and brilliant balance on the page that doesn’t necessarily translate from there. Yu, a writer for shows like Westworld and Lodge 49, is leading the charge with Taika Waititi as executive producer on a dizzyingly circular task: the TV adaptation of his novel in which everyone toils on a TV show. If it sounds too meta, well, that’s both the point and the show’s central flaw – at least, in the first half of ten episodes made available to critics, which chases its own tail in a criminal conspiracy, TV parody and shows within shows.

Yu has changed some of the book’s story, but we’re still focused on Willis Wu (Jimmy O Yang), a frustrated waiter at his uncle Wong’s (Archie Kao) restaurant in a Los Angeles-like Chinatown and a eternal background actor in Black. and White, the crime drama from the Law & Order spoof that was filmed there. Although he dreams of being a kung fu man like his long-missing older brother (Chris Pang), Willis only has a meager number of options available; at best, as he tells his aimless best friend and colleague Fatty Choi (Ronny Chieng) in the first scene, if you’re in the first scene of a show, you’re either a victim or a witness.

Willis witnesses a crime. Or perhaps there was a crime – although Waititi and a group of directors, including Jaffar Mahmood, John Lee and Alice Wu, use various demarcation techniques (shifts in light and music, altered perspectives), the boundary between surreality and reality, the imagination of Willis and the real world, remains hazy at best.

But overall, the kidnapping of a nail salon worker in Chinatown by what might be a gang—a nebulous crime spree in a minority neighborhood that is, of course, a classic part of American crime television—brings Willis out of his background silo and into the lead role. of characters. He’s still too small and too generically Asian to be noticed by Detectives Turner (Sullivan Jones) and Green (Lisa Gilroy), the satirically friendly stars of Black & White, but he does bond with Detective Lana Lee (Chloe Bennet ). , a department transfer who is demoted to Sidekick and Chinatown Expert due to her origins. Lee, who struggles to take on the role of lead detective with her own nagging insecurities, promises to help Willis become the hero by reopening the long-running investigation into the disappearance of his beloved brother – a tragedy that condemned Willis to the role of the perpetually disappointing youngest son. and shattered his Taiwanese immigrant parents (the underused Diana Lin and Tzi Ma).

The plot details, stakes and time period – Interior Chinatown appears to be set around the millennium, a time of landline telephones and boxy cars, but there’s also a hard-seltzer ad soundtracked by the 2000 trance hit Sandstorm – are, just as the various tropes, the tone skewers, both solid and malleable, for the more important story. Each episode takes on the feel of a video game, as Willis, the reluctant but desperate protagonist, literally unlocks new levels of mobility by taking on stereotypical roles: delivery boy, tech worker, and so on. This can make for cerebral viewing, if not particularly propulsive television. Aside from the stylized martial arts and SVU send-ups, the show’s surreal meta-ness is an admirable gamble that, stretched out across episodes, undermines its momentum.

However, it is heavily reflected in the more immediately inhabited scenes of SRO (single room occupancy) housing above the restaurant, where Willis, his parents, Fatty and their friends party, bicker, cook and heal. These scenes, which transition seamlessly between English and Mandarin, serve as a crucial grounding in reality for a series that can feel more like a thought exercise – how Doing do you adjust this? – then a story about people. Yang, who carries the exhaustion and determination of an actor long waiting for his chance, is an endearing and believably jaded protagonist. But the real standout is Chieng, a longtime Daily Show correspondent with the combative comedic timing to show for it.

This dense thicket of imagination, parody and allegory will probably make more sense to those who read the book first. For everyone else, I suspect Interior Chinatown contains two too many turns in the maze to get through ten episodes of about 45 minutes. It’s a provocative and sometimes genuinely entertaining exploration of how the stories we’ve been told shape the way we think – the irony is so well layered that, ironically, it gets in the way of itself.