When Charles Yu was a writer for the dystopian sci-fi HBO series Westworld, he went to set one day and saw dozens of naked actors lying on the floor, playing broken shells of automatons waiting to be revived. “They’re literally bodies lying on metallic shelving—and that’s somebody’s job,” Yu remembers thinking. “They’re coming here to put on body makeup and lie there naked for hours in a 60-degree environment.”
Witnessing the fringes of a television set and the stark realities of the people who make a living there partially inspired Yu’s novel, Interior Chinatown, which was released in early 2020. The genre-bending metanarrative tells the story of Willis, a “generic Asian man” in the background of a Law & Order-like procedural who longs to break out of his minor and oft-humiliating role. The novel not only skewered TV’s narrow formulas, but also served as a parable for how Asian Americans have long been shunted to the edges of American society. It struck a nerve during the pandemic, and won the National Book Award for Fiction.
The novel’s breakout success led to Yu receiving an opportunity he had not considered: Hulu calling and asking if he would be interested in turning Interior Chinatown into an actual television series. Such an adaptation would necessitate navigating a head-spinning stack of realities and mediums: to create a police procedural inside of a genre-busting action-dramedy, based on a novel written in the style of a TV screenplay. But Yu jumped at the opportunity, and signed on to write the adaptation and serve as the showrunner. “Going in, I should have been more mindful of the fact that literally everyone was like, this is going to be really hard,” Yu tells TIME. “I didn’t fully understand how hard it would be to crack it until I started doing it.”
Read More: What It’s Like to Never Ever See Yourself on TV
Four years later, the TV adaptation of Interior Chinatown arrives on Hulu on Nov. 19, to positive…
