Expats Season 1 trailer- Nicole Kidman endures shades of privilege and grief as an expat trophy wife

Prime Original Expats dropped its trailer today, anticipating a January premiere on the streaming platform. The show has already created quite a buzz, due to its stellar cast and promising plot.

Nicole Kidman and Brian Tee

Prime dropped the trailer for its much-anticipated series Expats, which was based on Janice Y.K. Lee’s bestseller The Expatriates. Directed by Lulu Wang, the vibrant and tumultuous drama will be of six episodes and drop two episodes on January 26, 2024, before releasing each on a weekly basis.

Set against the social and temporal tapestry of 2014 Hongkong, Expats follows the story of three women, Margaret, Hilary, and Mercy, and how their lives intersect when Margaret suffers an unexpected family tragedy.

Starring Nicole Kidman, Sarayu Blue, and Ji Young Yoo in the titular roles, the show also explores the fine line between privilege and exploitation, victimhood and guilt, as well as the interactions between the different strata of society.

The trailer of Expats shows an ethereal Nicole Kidman as Margaret, who lives a sheltered life, is kind to her local, household help, and a blissful family. All she wants at times is to be alone, bereft of any imposed identity.

As an expatriate trophy wife who only has an expatriate friend undergoing a divorce, what happens when she makes a new friend with a young Mercy, who wishes to have a new start to life at 24.

But the result is not a simple heartwarming comedy but a taut drama that features a lost child, grieving parents, a forever-guilty caretaker who had been with the kid till his absence, and a woman who does not know her reason of living and breathing in a country that was never hers, but her distant husband’s.

A poignant tale of loss, friendship, class hierarchy, relationships, as well as privilege, Expats also features the likes of Brian Tee, Jack Huston, Flora Chan, and Leon Masuda. Nicole Kidman also served as an executive producer on the project, along with Theresa Park and Stan Wlodkowski. Author Janice Y.K. Lee, Vera Miao and Gursimran Sandhu were in charge of the film’s screenplay.

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