In “White Dragon,” new to Amazon Prime Video on Friday, the hero is a London university lecturer named Jonah Mulray. Since the show is a dark, complicated, tortured-family mystery set in Hong Kong, his name can’t help but call to mind the neo-noir touchstone “Chinatown” and its doomed Mulwrays.

The connection lurks in the back of your mind, where you think, no, they can’t really be asking for the comparison. But then in the fifth of the mini-series’s eight episodes, another character tells Jonah he needs to temper his expectations of an answer to the mystery (his wife’s murder) because, after all, “This is Hong Kong.” She doesn’t say, “Forget it, Jonah,” but we get the point.

“White Dragon,” shown on ITV in Britain last year with the supremely dull but less Orientalist title “Strangers,” is no “Chinatown.” But it has its merits: the minor but distinct pleasures of location filming in Hong Kong, and the more serious attraction of compelling casting.

The show’s emotional core is familiar — the arc of Jonah and David Chen, a disgraced ex-cop, from antagonists to reluctant buddies — but it’s made fresh by the pairing of the British actor John Simm (“Life on Mars,” “State of Play”) and the Hong Kong actor Anthony Wong (“Hard-Boiled,” “Infernal Affairs”), among the most dependable and appealing performers in their respective industries.