Not surprisingly, Hulu saw cinematic potential in the premise and a 10-episode adaptation of the Jimmy O. Yang novel (“Silicon Valley“) in the main role premieres on November 19. Yu, a longtime novelist and TV writer who has worked on shows like “Westworld,” “Lodge 49” and “American Born Chinese,” adapted his own novel and took on the role. by the showrunner for the first time. But the origins of the novel’s screenplay made it “more difficult, surprisingly,” to turn it into a show, he said.

“Writing about TV is one thing, but trying to film this show within the show, the first thing that comes up is, does (Willis) know? What does he think of his reality?” Yu said. “In a book, your reader is your photographer. In a show, we had to make things tangible and concrete and clearer without overdoing it where we wanted to still keep some kind of mystery or ambiguity about what’s going on.”

Yu was inspired by shows like “Law & Order,” and the show has a lot of fun with stereotypes of how TV police officers behave. But it also contains darker questions about the hierarchy of such shows and who is at the top of them. Willis Wu works in a Chinese restaurant with his friend Fatty (comedian Ronny Chienghaving a lot of fun proving that restaurant patrons will put up with really terrible service if they think it’s “authentic”. But after meeting a mixed-race police detective (Chloe Bennet, of “Agents of SHIELD,” Willis becomes obsessed with earning his own spot in the police department and solving the disappearance of his beloved older brother.

Yu spoke to the Globe about the challenges and opportunities of telling the story of “Inside Chinatown” as a TV show.

Did adapting the novel for TV give you more options to describe Willis’ world?

You can’t use the infinite budget of someone’s imagination, but you can use Hulu’s considerable budget and tools like picture, sound, and music to create the idea that we’re meeting Willis Wu, who is the main character, but he’s not in the world. He’s basically a kind of NPC (non-playable character) if you’re playing video games or a non-speaking character in a TV show. But for him, this is just reality. Except his reality happens to look a lot like a police procedural from the ’90s. How do you create a plausible, textured, rich world through cinematography, through lighting, through sound and music, and how do you delineate that from what’s outside of that frame, which is where Willis lives? Live on the edge. He lives in the background and we enter the world through his perspective.

Writing a novel is a fairly solitary task, but television is by nature a collaborative medium. What was it like bringing all the other voices into the project?

I remember early on, Ronny Chieng, who plays Fatty Choi on the show, was doing a lot match. He tried on hoodies and clothes and practiced how he would hold a joint, for example, because the character is described in the pilot as a stoner and talks about smoking weed. And I could see that he had already started preparing for his character. And that was months before we shot. And I said, okay, this is going to be an iterative thing that we do together. He brings his talent, his face, his body, his voice, all his skills and his comedic persona. And then I can have words on a page. So I feel like it was such an instructive thing for me.

Detectives Green and Turner, the show’s “main characters” within the show, do not see Willis because he is a background character. It is both a commentary on race and a slapstick depiction of an invisible person. What techniques did you use to describe this?

By framing and by narrative exclusion—it has no part for him. So how do you literalize this kind of absence? What does this look like? And that was tricky, because sometimes it can be as literal as, a door won’t open and he can’t get in somewhere. And then other times it was through the way the shots were framed. A lot of thought went into making the cop series look a certain way. There’s something fun about how Willis literally can’t get into the shot. Partly because Lisa (Gilroy) and Sullivan (Jones), who play Green and Turner, are so tall that it’s easy to frame Jimmy in certain shots.

What did you want the show’s Chinatown to look like? It’s not in a specific city.

Not a real Chinatown, but something people could recognize in emotional and visual ways. There is some visual inspiration from San Francisco, from New York, from LA. We shot a little bit in LA. So many cities have Chinatowns in America and around the world. It is a place that encompasses many, many physical places. It is a refuge and anchor for communities and recent immigrants in many places, and historically it has served many functions. It is also a place in our imagination. If you are a tourist, you might want to go there for a good meal or good shopping or just for an adventure, a tourist experience. And if you live there, it’s where you live and work and where your family is from. And the dual nature of that is something I wanted to play with.

“Interior Chinatown” premieres on Hulu on November 19.

Lisa Weidenfeld can be reached at [email protected]. Follow X @LisaWeidenfeld and Instagram @lisaweidenfeld.