Watch the first trailer for the new TV adaptation of "Interior Chinatown"

I was a huge fan of Charles Yu's brilliantly metafictional novel Interior Chinatown, about a stereotypically Chinese background character who's perpetually trapped in the screenplay of a police procedural TV show. Just read this delightful blurb:

Willis Wu doesn't perceive himself as the protagonist in his own life: he's merely Generic Asian Man. Sometimes he gets to be Background Oriental Making a Weird Face or even Disgraced Son, but always he is relegated to a prop. Yet every day, he leaves his tiny room in a Chinatown SRO and enters the Golden Palace restaurant, where Black and White, a procedural cop show, is in perpetual production. He's a bit player here, too, but he dreams of being Kung Fu Guy—the most respected role that anyone who looks like him can attain. Or is it?

After stumbling into the spotlight, Willis finds himself launched into a wider world than he's ever known, discovering not only the secret history of Chinatown, but the buried legacy of his own family. Infinitely inventive and deeply personal, exploring the themes of pop culture, assimilation, and immigration—Interior Chinatown is Charles Yu's most moving, daring, and masterful novel yet.

Yu—who's also worked on TV shows such as Westworld—has now teamed up with Taika Waititi to turn his book into a television series, which premieres on Hulu on November 19. The show features Jimmy O. Yang, Ronny Chieng, Chloe Bennet, and more. While it's difficult for a TV show to fully capture the metatextual playfulness of the novel, which deftly mixes screenplay formatting with prose, the trailer definitely teases some fourth-wall-smashing action, and I'm excited to see how Yu translates his own work onto the screen.