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Posted in: Hulu, TV | Tagged: Charles Yu, hulu, Interior Chinatown, Jimmy O. Yang, taika waititi
Interior Chinatown: Taika Waititi, Jimmy O. Yang Team for Hulu Series
Interior Chinatown, Charles Yu's award-winning satirical novel about Asian-American representation and show business, is being adapted into a TV series on Hulu starring Jimmy O. Yang and executive produced by Taika Waititi, who will also direct the pilot.
Yang will play Willis Wu, a background actor in a procedural cop show called Black & White. Relegated to the background all the time, Willis goes through the motions of his on-screen job, waiting tables and dreaming about a whole world beyond Chinatown where he can have a proper acting career. When he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, Willis decides to investigate and ends up unraveling a criminal web in Chinatown as well as revelations about his own family history, and in the process, discovers what it feels like to be in the spotlight. Turns out it's not always rainbows and unicorns. The title "Interior Chinatown," a take-off of the slug lines of scene settings in screenplays, becomes a multilayered expression of theme and meaning, describing the hero's state of mind as well as his home and the settings of many cop show scenes when a bit of "Orientalist exoticism" is called for.
Hulu has ordered 10 episodes of Interior Chinatown, which offers a wild and wooly commentary on the stereotyping and condescension of Asians in America in society and popular culture, the invisibility of Asian-American actors, the insidiousness of the model minority myth, all wrapped up in an allegory of the central character being an actor role-playing Asian stereotypes in the background in cop shows. The novel skips different forms, from screenplay format to third-person prose and back again, reflecting the main character's fractured identity and state of mind. While this is author Charles Yu's second novel, he has been writing for TV for years on shows like Legion and Westworld and will be the showrunner for the TV adaptation of his book. Hopefully, the writer's room will be populated with Asian-American writers as well. There is no release date yet, we'll keep you posted as production on Interior Chinatown progresses.
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