TV Review: Interior Chinatown: More than a rehash

This show was a good take on the novel in that it added so much to the source material that it became its own thing entirely. Whereas the novel situated itself primarily as a character-based story about Willis Wu finding his identity as he tried to become the kind of person he admired, the show built on that with additional story lines that emphasized ancillary characters like Lana and Fatty and Willis’ mother, and even the detectives Green and Turner. The show became more of a plot-driven mystery as the characters investigated the disappearance of Willis’ brother.

We still get the surreal jumps into the life-as-TV-show scenes that we get in the novel, but it feels more natural in the show. I often found the switches in the novel confusing, especially in the beginning, but in the show at least I knew what to expect and there were more visual cues to delineate the switches.

The most compelling additional story for me was that of Willis’ mother, as she tries to become a real estate agent. It’s a cliched story to some extent - a cultural native achieves her dreams, but she finds that she’s betrayed her community and herself - but it’s grounding in its conventionality compared to the larger story that’s told in such an unconventional manner.

Charles Yu, the author of the novel and a veteran screen writer, acted as showrunner. I appreciate that kind of consistency between mediums! It’s refreshing to know that both stories are united by the author’s vision and I imagine this kind of control allowed him to ensure that the show didn’t subordinate itself to the novel as an underachieving adaptation.

I might go so far as to consider both the novel and the show constituent pieces of a single work of art for the way they offer different vantages to the same underlying themes, but they can also both stand alone on their own merits. The show is entertaining and vivid in a way the novel isn’t and the novel is more thought-provoking than the show in its comparatively sparse plot.

I’m glad I read the book first. I’d rather go from the more cerebral to the more entertaining than the other way around, and I’d recommend anyone else who’s interested to experience both versions of the story to do the same.