Willis Wu (Jimmy O. Yang) isn’t in the spotlight; a waiter at the Golden Palace restaurant in Chinatown, he’s someone nobody notices. “I feel like I’m a background character in someone else’s story,” he says in the first episode of the new Hulu series “Interior Chinatown.” And quite literally, he is: He’s a background player in “Black and White,” a ’90s police procedural TV series in which a pair of extremely attractive cops — Green (Lisa Gilroy) and Turner (Sullivan Jones) — strut around solving crimes. But Willis dreams about being someone more important, and, when he inadvertently witnesses a crime, he suddenly finds himself getting closer to the action — and closer to solving a mystery in his family as well.

Based on Charles Yu’s 2020 National Book Award-winning novel (Yu is intimately involved with the series, serving as showrunner, writer and executive producer), “Interior Chinatown” is an intricate, boxes-within-boxes show about storytelling, illusion and identity. (It’s not remotely a stretch to imagine this deeply cinematic novel on the screen: Yu wrote it in the format of a screenplay.) Willis, who longs for the spotlight, instead finds himself funneled into the kind of background roles — Waiter, Delivery Guy, Generic Asian Man — generally available to men who look like him in Hollywood. He’s often unseen, even when he’s right there in the shot. “Willis is invisible,” one of the cops notes.

It’s a tricky and extremely meta structure, full of questions. (Are we supposed to see Willis as a real person, or an actor? Who is scripting him? Is there, eventually, going to be a show within the show within the show? Or is there already?) In the five episodes (out of an eventual 10) made available for advance review, it’s not entirely clear where the show’s arc is headed, and sometimes the cleverness of the structure gets in the way of clarity. Yu has said in interviews that the series is basically a deconstruction of a TV show; you likely need to see the whole thing to get a clearer picture.

But there’s an appealing noirish feeling to “Interior Chinatown,” and it’s often wickedly funny. Willis is quickly dazzled by toothpick-chomping rookie cop Lana Lee (Chloe Bennet), who’s as gorgeous as all the cops are on this show, and who pulls a not-too-reluctant Willis into her world, one in which Green and Turner pose like models and do extremely precise high-fives. (I could watch an entire scene of just Gilroy’s peacock-like walk.) Ronny Chieng, as Willis’ friend and fellow waiter Fatty, slyly steals large portions of the series; Fatty doesn’t like to “interface with strangers” but slowly becomes locally famous for telling off the white customers who come in ordering things like “ginger chicken, but without the ginger.” The worse he treats them, he muses in wonder and annoyance, “the more they show up.”

And it’s a pleasure to see Yang, a comedian known mostly for supporting roles in “Silicon Valley” and “Crazy Rich Asians,” in the spotlight. His Willis is in over his head yet confident — making things up as he goes along, creating his new role on the fly, finding his niche in the action, seeking the light. “Everyone has secrets,” he tells himself quietly, midseason. “Everyone pretends.”

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'INTERIOR CHINATOWN'

2.5 stars (out of 4)

Rating: TV-MA

How to watch: Hulu

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