Interior Chinatown offers a fun, over-the-top exploration of police procedurals, as well as what it means to be Asian-American.

Charles Yu adapts his award-winning novel into a series that is both starkly different from the original and frustratingly familiar.

Gradually, it’s revealed that he’s actually a TV character forever trapped in the background of a police procedural. Created by Charles Yu, adapting his 2020 novel, the rules of the premise are never exactly clear,

It’s a funny situation, he acknowledged when we spoke this month. “That’s something I’ve wrestled with, to be honest,” Yu said. “It’s not even necessarily a matter of selling out or not. It’s, how do you tell the story in a way that still stays true to the original impulse — while staying current with the times,

The Hulu series unfolds in a Chinatown that “is both physical and psychological,” said Charles Yu, the creator. Here’s a look at how four key settings bring the story to life.

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.

There’s no escaping the layers of meta around “Interior Chinatown,” an adaptation of Charles Yu’s award-winning satirical novel that jabs at how Asian American men have been treated by Hollywood —