Gettin' My Eps In: Interior Chinatown S1E3
In which more background characters get to have their lives fleshed out.
Interior Chinatown
Season 1, Episode 3: “Tech Guy”
Written by Matthew Okumura
Directed by Jaffar Mahmood
Streaming on Hulu
As this series settles into its groove, I think I’m starting to understand its focus and its goals a bit better. It’s not just going to be about one specific minor character who is usually relegated to the background getting to be more fleshed out; it’s going to show that all of the people who don’t usually have anything to do on TV shows have lives that extend beyond what we see on the screen. Or at least, that’s the way things seem to be heading based on what we’ve seen so far.
We had already seen some of this in the first two episodes, which spent time showing us the lives of Willis Wu (Jimmy O. Yang) and his family and friends in Chinatown. In the third episode, that gets extended to some of the background characters who populate the Port Harbor police precinct. After Willis finally figured out how to get inside the station at the end of the last episode by posing as a delivery guy from the Chinese restaurant where he works, he still has trouble getting past the entryway until he takes a moment to get to know the desk sergeant and the janitor, sharing some of the food he brought with them, asking their names, and learning about who they are as people rather than faceless nobodies who repeat the same lines over and over. Later in the episode, he gets to encourage a romance between the desk sergeant and the lady who runs the evidence room, and he even gets welcomed into this small community of people that nobody else pays any attention to.
However, he’s also furthering his original goal, which isn’t just to be someone who is more important to the TV show he is living within, but also to find out what happened to his brother, who disappeared mysteriously 12 years ago. His reason for regularly returning to the police station is to try to uncover information related to his brother, and he spends time searching through what evidence is still available. It’s a race against time, since some faceless person in the city’s government has decided that the police need to get rid of any evidence that’s not related to ongoing cases, and Willis needs to try to find something before it gets destroyed. I’m not sure if this is supposed to be referencing anything as part of the show’s ongoing meta-commentary (maybe that episodic procedurals may not worry too much about things that happened in previous seasons?), but it could just be something that has been imposed to provide a sense of urgency and keep things moving.
The other main portion of the plot involves Lana’s attempts to remain involved in the cases that the stars of Black & White: Impossible Crimes Unit are investigating so that she won’t get fired/written off the show. She spends the episode trying to ingratiate herself to Turner (Sullivan Jones) and Green (Lisa Gilroy) while demonstrating her value as a Chinatown expert (even though she doesn’t seem to know that much about Chinatown and relies on Willis to give her information). This leads to some amusing bits, such as Green’s continued attempts to make the types of puns that are typical of TV police detectives (when talking about the murder of a famous conductor, she says “It looks like he wasn’t ready to face the music”), which only serves to annoy Turner. This portion of the episode mostly serves to provide some wry commentary on the silliness of cop shows and their formulaic nature, such as how Turner is always walking through the police station announcing that he needs some images enhanced.
The lower-tier subplots involving the people that Willis left behind in Chinatown are still running, although they’re given less prominence in this episode. Willis’ mom (Diana Lin) is still working on starting her career as a real estate agent, sometimes with the help of Willis’ friend and coworker Choi (Ronny Chieng). Choi is also still doing a terrible job as a waiter when filling in for Willis, which may be leading to a running gag in which the restaurant gets more popular with white hipster customers who are looking for a more “authentic” experience. I’m not sure if any of these elements of the show will pay off, but I’m hoping they’ll be more than just time-filling flavor.
As for the metafictional elements of the show, they’ve almost started to fade into the background, or at least they’ve become part of the expected nature of the series. The lighting is still continuing to change to a more dramatic blue tint whenever the “glam squad” enters a scene, sometimes leading to characters acting disoriented when they wonder why things look different in the next room over. While Willis has been granted access to the police station as a delivery guy, he’s still strictly limited to being there during lunch hour, and as soon as it’s over, the same officer shows up to escort him out. Willis seems like he’s starting to accept that the universe is structured a certain way, and he has to figure out how to play within its rules.
That’s what leads him to assume a new role as the police department’s “tech guy,” hoping that it will give him access to digital records. He realizes that the current tech guy is another semi-faceless nobody, and the glam squad (and the show’s viewers?) won’t even notice if Willis replaces him (in a pointed bit of commentary, the current guy appears to be South Asian, a completely different ethnicity than Willis, but the white characters don’t seem to be able to tell non-white people apart). When he accomplishes this goal, it’s like he’s been slotted into that existing role, since he can’t even see the computer screen at the tech guy’s desk until he puts on the previous guy’s glasses.
We’ll have to see where Willis’ ongoing search leads him. The next episode is titled “Kung Fu Guy,” but rather than being the next role that Willis is destined to play, it seems like it’s going to be about what happened to his brother, since that’s how the police records discussing his case refer to him. Maybe we’ll get to see some flashbacks and learn about his history with the police department, where he was limited to doing the one thing that most Asian characters on these types of shows are known for.
As I’ve said with previous episodes, I’m going to continue to hope for more metafictional content and explorations of what it’s like to live inside a TV show. I’m still curious about how much Lana knows about her status as a fictional character, especially after a moment in this episode where Willis discovers a drawer in her desk that’s filled with ID badges for various jobs/roles she held previously. I also like how she and the other police officers keep asking about a gang known as the Painted Faces, but none of the people who actually live in Chinatown have ever heard of them, since this seems to be a plot point that writers who know nothing about Asian people’s lives have written into the show. As long as this series can keep coming up with interesting ways to play with the reality that the characters live in, I expect that I’ll be happy.