The central hook of HBO Max series Tokyo Vice is American journalist Jake Adelstein (Ansel Elgort) becoming the first foreigner to work as a reporter for a major Tokyo newspaper. As the series goes on, Jake becomes almost a liability, the least interesting character in a show constructed around his story. Tokyo Vice is based on the real-life Adelstein's 2009 memoir, although it's been heavily fictionalized, adding a range of supporting characters involved in Tokyo's underworld. The more that Tokyo Vice strays from Jake and his crusading investigative journalism, the more satisfying it is to watch.

Tokyo Vice's first episode is directed by filmmaker Michael Mann, who focuses primarily on Jake and gives the show the same kind of cool urban sheen as his 2006 Miami Vice film. He scales back the muddy digital look of his most recent movies, but there's still a distinctive Mann approach to the episode. Subsequent episodes helmed by other directors take a more straightforward approach, as the storytelling opens up into a more conventional ensemble crime drama.

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Rinko Kikuchi in Tokyo Vice

Set primarily in 1999, Tokyo Vice begins with a flash-forward to two years later, as Jake is accompanying Tokyo police detective Hiroto Katagiri (Ken Watanabe) to a tense meeting with a yakuza boss, who threatens Jake's life if he publishes the story he's been working on. Two years earlier, Jake is just another American ex-pat teaching English in Tokyo, although he has grander ambitions. He came to Japan to study literature and never left, and his language skills are good enough that he breezes through the high-pressure written exam for a chance at an entry-level reporting job. He faces racism and anti-Semitism in his job interview but he still gets hired, making him a target among his colleagues who see him as a novelty rather than a qualified journalist.

Perhaps because Adelstein is an executive producer, Tokyo Vice portrays Jake as smarter and more capable than many of his colleagues, and he often comes off as smug rather than inquisitive. He makes mistakes and gets reprimanded by his bosses, but it's almost always because he's too dedicated to finding out the real story, while reporters at his level are mostly just expected to repeat what the police put out in press releases. After finding the same mysterious corporate symbol at the site of one suicide and one murder, Jake starts digging into the practices of a shady loan company and its potential yakuza connections, which eventually puts him in contact with Katagiri.

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Rachel Keller in Tokyo Vice

Tokyo Vice also devotes plenty of time to two other people in Jake's life, with whom he forms a loose love triangle. Although they're both introduced via their connections to Jake, they have their own separate storylines that receive increasing attention throughout the five episodes available for review. Jake encounters both of them at a hostess club, a sort of combination of bar and brothel, where men rent the time and attention of beautiful women for nonsexual purposes (at least officially). Fellow American ex-pat Samantha (Legion's Rachel Keller) is one of the hostesses, and Jake is immediately drawn to her. Both of them have started new lives in Japan, rejecting entreaties to return to America, and they bond over their shared outsider status.

Jake and Samantha both also bond in different ways with Sato (Shô Kasamatsu), a sensitive mid-level yakuza enforcer who seems conflicted about his position in organized crime. Both Samantha and Sato are more nuanced characters than Jake, and maybe because they're fictional, the creators have more leeway to give them dark and complicated backgrounds. The result is that Jake feels more like an afterthought, especially with Elgort's smirking, bland performance in contrast to the far more accomplished work from Keller, Kasamatsu, and Rinko Kikuchi as Jake's no-nonsense editor. Keller and Kikuchi convey more depth and emotional complexity with furtive looks and facial expressions than Elgort manages with all of his loud bluster.

Creator J.T. Rogers and the other writers deepen those characters over the course of the season while also building up to a war between two different yakuza clans -- one entrenched in Tokyo, the other an upstart trying to take over. Tokyo Vice crams a lot of big themes into these episodes, from the ex-pat experience in Japan to the complex relationship between Tokyo's cops and criminals to the structure of the journalism industry. The themes are mostly balanced well, giving enough screen time to each. Although there are often awkward, unconvincing moments of characters switching from speaking Japanese to English, Tokyo Vice still largely feels authentic and not just a show for Americans to gawk at the oddities of Japanese culture. Its main character may be a bit of a boorish, overconfident American, but Tokyo Vice compensates for his clumsy presence by creating a fascinating, rewarding world around him.

The first three episodes of Tokyo Vice premiere Thursday, April 7 on HBO Max, with subsequent episodes debuting on Thursdays.

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