UK TV review: Expats
Review Overview
Privilege
5Perspectives
9Empathy
9Ivan Radford | On 26, Jan 2024
Episodes 1 and 2 premiere on 26th January, followed by episodes weekly. This review is based on Episodes 1, 2 and 5.
In this omni-TV age, people often recommend a show but tell you “wait until this episode, as that’s when it gets good”. Expats, Amazon’s glossy new drama from the remarkable Lulu Wang, is a stunning, nuanced drama – but perhaps only if you wait until Episode 5, then start by watching that episode first.
Based on Janice YK Lee’s 2016 novel The Expatriates, the series follows three expat women in Hong Kong. There’s Margaret (Nicole Kidman), mother to three kids and husband to Clarke (Brian Tee), who moved to the city for his career and is now feeling adrift. There’s Hilary (Sarayu Blue), whose marriage to David (Jack Huston), is crumbling despite her best efforts for things to seem otherwise. And there’s Mercy (Ji-young Yoo), a 24-year-old Korean-American graduate who is looking for a fresh start away from her mother.
Mercy is our narrator and meditates on how, when tragedies happen, stories tend to focus on the victims rather than the perpetrators. She ponders on compassion and forgiveness, on grief and pain. She’s a fascinating figure, who careens from casual catering gigs to recklessly diving off an upscale boat and trying swim underneath it and, as she emerges as the turning point for the six-part narrative, grapples with a sudden onslaught of responsibility and consequences.
But the focus is initially on Margaret, who is preoccupied with trying to hold a birthday party for Clarke, while still trying to come to turns with a tragedy one year earlier. Brian Tee, delivering a birthday speech, is a heartfelt mix of broken sadness and growing numbness, while Nicole Kidman is as good as you’d expect as the traumatised mother prone to looking into the distance with haunted, glazed-over eyes.
“I love my family but I have this growing desire to leave them,” she confesses to Hilary, in a way that captures the intimacy of their friendship – even though Margaret is too self-absorbed to even acknowledge that Hilary has problems of her own. Sarayu Blue is understated and thoughtful as the overly composed Hilary, who suspects her husband isn’t being honest even as she’s concealing her own reluctance to start building a family together.
The first two episodes build towards the climactic event that will shape and interlink these women’s lives, as we get to know them both before and afterwards. That slow, careful pacing allows time for Wang to build up the layers of interconnectedness that go beyond the plot, from the bond residents have with the urban city around them to their shared but unique feelings of dislocation.
The challenge is that they’re all coming from a place of wealth, which can make it hard to sympathise with them. That’s why Episode 5, Central, is crucial to the show’s success. The 90-minute chapter serves almost as a standalone tale that gives us an entirely different perspective on events: for that episode, we follow instead Essie (Ruby Ruiz), Margaret’s “helper”, a Filipina live-in nanny who has her own family back home who want her there, and all the other women working for these expat families, including Puri (Amelyn Pardenilla), who’s employed by Hilary and told she’s like family, even though she’s treated as a disposable afterthought.
It’s a beautiful, uplifting, poignant and moving tale that lets each of these background characters become fully formed people. We see them sing together, we learn about their dreams and hopes, we join them in their gossiping about their employers’ secrets. What we learn most of all, through Ruby Ruiz’s charismatic, caring performance and Amelyn Pardenilla’s open earnestness, is the grace that these women comport themselves with, even as they are reminded, again and again, that they can only rely on themselves.
Wang’s camera, through long, unhurried takes, seamlessly carries us from bustling markets and empty corridors to steamy apartment encounters and clandestine swimming pool trips. Intercut with a probing conversation about whether religion can offer an anchor of hope or meaning, the collage of fragmented parts comes together to show us how these lives are all part of a bigger civilisation. There’s a deep nuance to that exploration of how everyone’s perspectives are different, how everyone tries to sweep things under the rug and – through one gripping subplot involving the 2014 pro-democracy uprising – how everyone is responsible for what they do to make the world around them a better or worse place.
Viewed through the lens of Central, Expats blossoms into life and becomes an expansive, gorgeously filmed dissection of classism, racism and privilege. It’s no wonder, then, that Wang’s condition for making the series was adding this penultimate episode into the mix. The completed set is a thought-provoking reminder of the importance of empathy and opening up your understanding to consider other people’s experiences as well as your own. You just have to get to Episode 5 to see it that way.