Expats caused quite a stir in Hong Kong during production. It was at the height of the COVID pandemic and alleged special treatments was a hot topic locally for a while.
When it was finally launched on Amazon Prime, it triggered further discussions for being banned in Hong Kong – the place where it was said to have been granted special treatments a few years back.
But what was the fuss about?
I was interested in the series as soon as I heard Nicole Kidman’s production company bought the rights. I reached out and wrote to them directly, however with no response. I thought it would be so cool to have a chance to do an acting job in Hong Kong, the place where I was born and grew up in. Nonetheless the failed attempt did not dampen my interest in the show.
After watching the show, I understood why it was banned in Hong Kong. The show covered a turbulence period of the territory and there was no way to skirt around the subject. I have not read the original material, so cannot confirm whether it was intentional to include that period of social movement in the show, or it just happened to be faithful to the book. It was a pity that the Hong Kong audience cannot see it, as it has some of the renowned local actors in the show, and some of them have very good scenes showcasing them as powerhouses in the local acting industry.
Back to the main premise of the show.
If you don’t know about the original material, you would have thought that Expats is about the glamourous lifestyles of expatriates living in Hong Kong. Certainly, you can see certain aspects of it in the show. But in fact, it was a story about a fateful event that connected several expatriates’ families in Hong Kong, and how everything crumbled down in this seemingly perfect lives of these people. Throughout the six episodes, you witnessed the toil event had triggered for these characters, both emotionally and mentally. It also exposed some of the conscious and unconscious entitlement that these people have, whether you are rich or not.
There was a common thread to most of the characters – they thought they were victims of other people, and when there were fall outs, the first instinct was to blame everyone else without going back to the root cause. And that’s the entitlement feeling I was referring to – not the materialistic aspect. The cruel event that descended upon Nicole Kidman’s Margaret was gut wrenching, that’s for sure, and nobody would want to share her same fate any time, any day. However, when we looked closely at it, yes Margaret was a great, caring employer to Essie, but it was because of her unfounded jealousy towards her between Essie’s closeness with her kids that she made a rash decision to replace her, which eventually led to her emotional and mental downfall. She might be nice to everyone on the surface, or she might feel compelled to be nice to everyone, but then deep down, she was still a self-serving person, who eventually wrecked her friend’s marriage, disregarded the law, and put her kids lives on the line to accomplish her goal to ‘redeem a tragedy caused by others’. She by no means is a bad mother, but her motherhood was seriously flawed. Her final realisation came too late to salvage what is left, but at least she was willing to face what she had triggered into motion in this web of tragic events.
Sarayu Blue’s Hilary was one of the prime victims in Margaret’s relentless hunt for answer and redemption. On the surface, it seemed that her marriage broke down because Margaret’s accusations, but when you dive deeper, the foundation had long been eroded. The existence of Margaret’s hunt was just the catalyst for the whole thing to fall apart. She tried to put up a high horse front, when at times of weakness, admitted that she was part of the reason for tumbling of her marriage. It was at this point that she realised that she was running, hiding, and throwing other people under the bus for her own security.
Ji-young Yoo’s Mercy, the last main character (can’t really say she is a protagonist), was the one who pulled the pin on these perfect expatriates’ lives. The reality was that while she had no idea what she wants to become, her selfish behaviour led to a tragedy befalling on an unwitting family. She was never serious about doing the job, she just wanted the job because it would be cool and probably paying handsomely for a lifestyle she wanted to be part of. When that fell apart, she got involved with a married man as a hideaway, and eventually blamed all the bad things happening around her as a ‘curse’ instead of a result of her behaviours and wrong decisions.
To be honest with you, there were no likeable characters in Expats, but then it doesn’t mean that it is a bad series. It just made it hard for you to feel anything for those characters when every turn of events you have that ‘you asked for it’ feeling. Performance-wise, they were all great performances. I just hoped that there would be an angle or two that you could see through an empathetic lens for these characters. But it is hard when these characters are anything but empathetic to themselves or others. After the six episodes run, all I could remember was drowning in the drowning of these characters with two outstanding scenes that came late in the series.
Expats is not an easy digest. I think that’s what everyone needs to prepare for before hitting the ‘play’ button. Nonetheless, it’s a pretty serious journey.
Expats is now streaming on Amazon Prime everywhere, except Hong Kong.
