Taika Waititi’s Open-Hearted Television Empire

One of the most common comedic arcs in twenty-first-century TV is the journey from cynicism to hope. Mockumentaries like The Office, Parks and Recreation, and even Abbott Elementary often begin as pinched indictments of the failing institutions they represent. Characters are moronic villains, lifeless cogs, right-angle bureaucrats, dissociated bystanders, wizened elders, or naïve strivers. But as the show wears on, and as the systems either bend to the will of the optimists or are transformed internally by them, hope enters the screen. An acid tongue becomes a sweet tooth, the meaninglessness of a life under capitalism becomes the profundity of a family forged under its gaze. Shows that started on a bleak landscape end on a vibrant screen saver of a sunset. And while all that joy and satisfaction might buoy our spirits as viewers, most of those shows are ultimately the worse for succumbing to them. It’s a rare show—Party Down is a striking example—that holds that tartness beyond its infancy. 

But there’s another way. What if the movement of a comedy series wasn’t from closed to open but started out with a spirit of openheartedness? What if instead of framing a show with smug cynicism only to have its heart grow three sizes over three seasons, that show were framed with compassion and wonder? What might be the comedic ceiling of such a humanist television philosophy? Where might it take us?

Taika Waititi has been asking those questions for five years now, and many of his answers have been nothing short of extraordinary. Waititi is a New Zealand filmmaker who came up in the early aughts, making slightly twee, off-kilter dramedies about life in his home country, several of which feature large ensemble casts of relatively unknown Indigenous actors. After the breakout buzz from his surprisingly tender 2014 vampire mockumentary film, What We Do in the Shadows, and the festival success of the slapstick adventure Hunt for the Wilderpeople,Waititi received the reward so many young independent filmmakers like him either lust after or flee: control of a Marvel franchise. His 2017 Thor: Ragnarok was a commercial and critical hit—as critical to the MCU’s revitalization as the following year’s sensation, Black Panther—and Waititi himself became something of a celebrity. The gates of Hollywood opened before him. As a filmmaker, Waititi quickly worked to squander all that goodwill with a handful of ill-advised feature projects—including Jojo Rabbit, in which Waititi stars as Adolf Hitler—but as a television producer, he shone.

Waititi is a somewhat unlikely media mogul. In comparison to titanic movers and shakers like Shonda Rhimes, Ryan Murphy, and Taylor Sheridan, Waititi is a boutique figure. He hasn’t generated the zillions those impresarios have, nor has he created the same kind of culture-shifting iconic watercooler series, but, for the past five years or so, Taika Waititi has busily and carefully produced a roster of some of the most compelling, bespoke, weird little televisual objects I’ve seen in a long time. What We Do in the Shadows, Reservation Dogs, Our Flag Means Death—in an era of reboots, spin-offs, and limited series, Waititi’s stable of oddities are defiantly original, rambling, rollicking, freewheeling concepts. Each of these shows created the niches they would come to occupy. Each of these shows resists the cynicism that grounds so many successful comedies—in order to reach for something harder, more human, even.

Many of these projects might sound, on first description, like little more than a bit, the beginnings of a comedy sketch or a viral video concept. Gay pirates. Dumb vampires. Native American teens in Tarantino cosplay. It’s easy to bet against the longevity of pitches like these. But Waititi’s gift has been in finding and trusting writers who have an alternate vision of what might work in TV comedy and using his prominence to get these weird and good ideas on-screen. The first show Waititi created after his Marvel success, 2019’s What We Do in the Shadows, a TV adaptation of his 2014 film, comes to an end this winter, just as his latest project, Interior Chinatown—created by Charles Yu, based on his novel of the same name—premieres. Both shows understand the cruelty and stupidity of their worlds, but from the outset they find hopefulness in escape, in resistance, and in refusal.

All ghost stories are about loneliness. While the vampires of What We Do in the Shadows notably hate ghosts—among the gallery of ghouls and Universal Studios monsters that have made cameo appearances across six seasons, ghosts are the most annoying—their story is about loneliness too. Created by Waititi and longtime collaborator Jemaine Clement, What We Do in the Shadows follows a quartet of vampires and their human familiar, Guillermo (Harvey Guillén), who live as roommates in a derelict mansion on Staten Island. Like the film, the show’s premise is that, though these creatures are supernaturally powerful, remorselessly murderous, and immortal, their long lives have made them somehow more human, not less. Over the course of centuries, they do not necessarily learn and grow so much as repeat the classic human life transitions—coming of age, rebellion, midlife crisis, old age—over and over in different settings. One character dies and is literally reborn as an infant mid-series.

Waititi and Clement’s innovation was not just to make these vampires silly and unsexy but to understand that immortality has made them vulnerable. They may have hardened to human morals—they kill wantonly—but they have accumulated, almost unthinkingly, deep and craggy human emotions. We behold the insecurity of Nandor the Relentless (Kayvan Novak) at epic scale, see the love of Laszlo (Matt Berry) and Nadja (Natasia Demetriou) for each other span centuries and continents, witness how Laszlo himself has ruined the life of his next-door neighbor by erasing his memory too many times (“the brain scramblies”) but has also devoted himself to that friendship. Colin Robinson (Mark Proksch), who is an “energy vampire,” siphoning psychic energy rather than blood from his victims, literally needs to interact with other people to survive. Social life is his food. These vampires are frightening assholes, but the thing they’re most afraid of is being alone.

Over the course of six seasons, we’ve accompanied the gang on a variety of adventures, from a disastrous trip to a vampire theater gala to Laszlo’s life on the lam to Nandor’s attempt to fly to outer space. The series-long will-they-won’t-they has been whether Nandor will ever agree to turn Guillermo—his long-suffering servant, and the only being in that house with a functioning brain—into a vampire. In the fifth season, after Guillermo goes around his boss and gets turned by another vampire, he has a falling-out with Nandor, gets buyer’s remorse, and ultimately turns human again with Nandor’s help. This season, the show’s last, picks up with life after that transition and detransition.

This sixth season has a new energy, and much of that energy is turned outward. Laszlo and Colin Robinson create a Frankenstein’s monster—Laszlo insists he’s never heard of Victor Frankenstein—and deal with his (its?) strangely intuitive introduction into human society. Guillermo takes a position at a nocturnal financial firm called Cannon Capital Strategies, and Nadja and Nandor get unexpectedly invested in the menial jobs they take there to boost their familiar’s prospects. When Guillermo is forced to fire Nandor from his janitorial job (Nandor is too chatty, and he also cleans the desktop computers in the office with a wet mop), he first tries to help him by telling him to be “invisible.” When that doesn’t work, he fires him for being a bad “culture fit,” a piece of corporate speak that doubles as Nandor’s worst fear. He doesn’t fit. In the culture.

Enraged and depressed, Nandor runs off to New Hampshire, holes up in the abandoned factory of a clothing company Cannon Capital shut down, and turns the laid-off workers into a bloodthirsty army. It’s a funny bit, but once all the comedic set pieces have been squeezed out of it, when it’s just Nandor and ­Guillermo talking, we come to understand that it’s about Nandor’s fear of his own irrelevance. Nobody needs me, nobody wants me, I’m invisible.

As What We Do in the Shadows comes to its end, moments like these abound, but they’re never too maudlin. Right after their heart-to-heart, Nandor delivers a rousing speech, dispatching his army to burn Dartmouth College to the ground. It’s rare for a TV comedy—especially one as goofy as this—to have characters with distinct and complex moral and emotional arcs this sutured to their gags and pratfalls. The premise of this show is a joke, but its characters are real live (or at least undead) people.

Interior Chinatown is also about an invisible man, a poor culture fit. Or maybe it’s about a man who’s visible, but only in circumscribed ways, an uncannily too-neat culture fit. Created by Charles Yu, based on his National Book Award–winning novel, the show follows Willis Wu (Jimmy O. Yang), a waiter at a restaurant in a fictional Chinatown, taking care of his elderly parents in the wake of the disappearance of his golden child older brother. The premise—the bit—is that, in his actual life, Willis can only occupy stereotypical Asian roles. “Waiter,” “Delivery Man,” “Generic Asian Man.”

This is the show’s meta-critique, but it’s also the show’s reality. Early in the show, a murder mystery begins to unfold in Willis’s neighborhood, and the more he tries to get involved—having witnessed a key event firsthand—the more he learns the limits of his own personhood. Conversations transpire in which he literally cannot be heard, certain doors physically will not open to him, scenes in which he is a main character are often blocked so that he is deliberately and conspicuously not in focus, sometimes cropped out of the frame even when he has a speaking role. The whole thing is a cheeky and sharp satire of the way Asian characters—and the actors who play them—have historically been marginalized in media, and the way that marginalization trickles down into daily social life. Chinatown itself becomes a hidden, forgotten, unassimilated part of the larger urban scene, and Willis is its avatar.

All of this is compounded by the fact that Interior Chinatown toggles between two different shows. One of these follows Willis’s day-to-day life. This show is richly textured, silly but naturalistic. He works and lives with his best friend, Fatty (Ronny Chieng), and their scenes together give genuine warmth and life to what could otherwise be a chilly and remote metafictional conceit. He visits his mother, who’s earning a real estate license and trying to get back on her feet, and his father, a former kung fu instructor who can’t process the loss of his son. Their apartment building is an intergenerational, intimate network, and the show’s exploration of it over the course of the early episodes is one of its great strengths. Willis, thanks in part to Yang’s cramped, charismatic performance, is a real live person.

But, in the other show that involves Interior Chinatown, he is avowedly not. Like recent hits WandaVision and Agatha All Along, Interior Chinatown features a fake genre show. Once the Chinatown murder mystery begins, two police detectives descend upon the neighborhood. They are exclusively represented on-screen as part of a popular Law & Order–style police procedural called Black & White. When they are in the room, the lighting shifts, the dialogue style transforms, and Willis—who notices all of this—is caught in the surreal situation of being shunted into a background role in his own life.

The moments when Willis runs up against those boundaries are shocking and fun. He’s brought into the murder mystery by Lana Lee (Chloe Bennet), a biracial detective who is herself brought onto the case as a token Asian. She’s a native informant who’s supposed to be an “expert” in Chinatown, even though she doesn’t know anything about it. Willis, in turn, becomes her Chinatown expert. The show does its funniest and most insightful work when it plays with the different levels of access these two buddies have to the world of Black & White. In one scene, Willis keeps trying to answer a question from the detectives that only Lana is allowed to answer. In another, Willis simply wanders quizzically around a scene from Black & White in which he’s not involved, preposterously unnoticed by the players. An invisible man.

Waititi executive-produced Interior Chinatown and directed its pilot episode. While this show does not have the blunt humanism of his 2021 show, Reservation Dogs, or the soaring romance of Our Flag Means Death, or even the surprising compassion of What We Do in the Shadows, it is, in some ways, the most directly expressive of Waititi’s TV projects. It is, indeed, a show about how people don’t usually make shows about people like Willis Wu. The plights of Willis in Interior Chinatown and of Guillermo in What We Do in the Shadows and of Bear Smallhill and Elora Danan in Reservation Dogs are different, but these characters share a grasping desire to be something else, to find a way in the world other than the one plotted out for them. These shows, in contrast to those workplace mockumentaries, don’t have the luxury of cynicism. They have to be energized by some crazy, improbable hope in order to exist at all. The world is a dire place. People, especially people in power, are unkind, uncompassionate, inhuman. But, at the margins, there are misadventures being had, lives being lived. They aren’t a culture fit, but the culture, bit by bit, is changing.