Review by C.J. Bunce
If you get a chance to see Int. Chinatown, now streaming on Hulu, you should check it out. It is ambitious, probably to a fault. It follows Jimmy O. Yang as Willis Wu, a young man in 1980s Chinatown working as a waiter. To everyone else he is just another guy in the crowd, and that’s even how he’s grown to see himself. The series does not follow any normal TV show design, and that title is the clue as to what is going on. “Int.” stands for Interior, a screenplay direction that cues the production to know that the coming scene will be an interior view. This story isn’t just about Willis, but about the surreal world Willis finds himself in when his own existence becomes (often confusingly) fused with the characters of a popular Law & Order-inspired cop show called Black and White. It’s the kind of quirky show that ultimately never reveals what is going on, a bit like J.J. Abrams TV series Lost. It’s also very meta–what’s real and what’s not is often left to the director of each new episode, and each episode takes a different look at cop shows and Asian TV, presented as different genres. But the real reason to watch the series is co-star Ronny Chieng, who also has a smart and funny new comedy special on Netflix called Love to Hate It.
Like so many TV series today, the fun of watching the show is the experience of seeing bright rising stars doing their thing. Int. Chinatown also boasts some effort to be fresh and different, thanks to a novel by Charles Yu, a big writing staff and directors like Taika Waititi.
But the actors are why you should show up. The cast includes Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. star Chloe Bennet as Lana Lee, a cop on the TV series Black and White trying to work her way up. She may have had a previous relationship with Willis’s brother, dead before the beginning of the show. Willis–and Lana–want to know why he died, and this becomes the mystery for the detectives to suss out. Willis isn’t just a waiter–he’s also a background actor in Black and White. Sounds confusing? That’s because it is, and the nuance of the script isn’t crisp enough to always keep viewers on course. As a bonus the large AAPI cast includes familar faces like The Brothers Sun’s Highdee Kuan, the ubiquitous Tzi Ma (as Willis’s dad), The Portable Door’s Diana Lin (as Willis’s mom), The Gilded Age’s Sullivan Jones is one of the star detectives on Black and White and Unstable’s Lisa Gilroy is the other. The show is filled with martial arts action, cop show elements, and it seems to try to play with Asian TV tropes, which doesn’t always work in its favor.
Then there is Ronny Chieng. Chieng is a stand-up comedian, and–as he sneaks into his act on the new Netflix special Love to Hate It–he has been in everything, from Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings to M3GAN, to Doogie Kamehaloa, M.D., to Godzilla vs. Kong, to Nora from Queens, in addition to his stint on The Daily Show. In Int. Chinatown he is Willis’s friend Fatty Choi, another waiter. But when Willis becomes infatuated with Lana Lee and pursues finding out who killed his brother, it’s Chieng who takes over the show.
Fatty Choi is fed up with running his uncle’s restaurant with so little help, and his covering for Willis’s absences hits a breaking point, causing him to treat all the customers rudely. He’s so rude that white customers begin flocking to the restaurant just to be treated badly by the Angry Waiter, until he becomes the restaurant’s star attraction. Chieng’s take on the character as put-upon, angry, serious, waiter is brilliantly, hysterically funny stuff. And that’s the reason to make your way through this very strange series.
You should also check out his hour-long Netflix special. Chieng’s humor is sharp, and his evaluation of the human condition and everyone’s place in America right now couldn’t be more on point.
Int. Chinatown is now streaming on Hulu. Love to Hate It is streaming on Netflix.
