Expats on Prime

[Showmethebagels]

Is anyone watching Expats on Prime? I’m really enjoying it, disappointed only episode 1 and 2 currently available, episode 3 next Friday. Annoyingly a couple of reviews contained spoilers for events only revealed in episode 2.

Nicole Kidman has been phoning it in for years now.

She always seems to be going through the motions and adds nothing to the role.

Also, it doesn't help that she is at least 10 years too old for this part. And her facial 'work' is distracting.

It does seem like it lately. She was good as a baddie in that film years ago with Alex Baldwin...Malice?

Possible spoiler

watched the 2 episodes and it seemed very slow and mysterious but I think that's the point. My issue is and I don't always like anticipation so I googled about the book this is based from and it does look like the book gives an explanation to G disappearance. And that would really cause me not to want to watch! I don't want to mystery to basically continue the mystery. I guess I want it very black and white! U can't have the main plot he the kids goes missing and then not actually have an ending for that. If someone did it I want to know who and why from the cast! Anyways that's enough of me ranting! 😆

*it looks like it doesn't

That’s true, the book doesn’t. But the series is quite different in some major ways so far so I don’t think we can assume they will be the same. For example, in the book Gus disappeared when they were all on holiday in Korea, not at home in HK.

Yes I'm hoping I will be gutted if the mystery isn't solved ! I think because there is just so much content for us to watch now with so many streaming platforms, and I don't have much time to watch I want to make sure it's good!

I see episode 3 is there now! Shame I’m at work…

Hated that scene with Mercy and David 😟

I started watching this tonight (eps 1-3). I read the book.

I really liked the book and as an ex-expat (not HK) I felt it really captured a lot of expat life really well.

Not sure at all about the series. There are big departures from the book that I don’t think are necessary and don’t add to the story. Things added, things left out or completely changed.

There’s a lot of texting, but it’s hard to see what’s being texted on the handheld phones. I feel like if I don’t want to miss it I need to pause and walk up close to the TV.

Then there’s the issue of Nicole’s face. It’s just so distracting. She looks less and less like herself, and the weird stiff projecting lips make every profile shot look like she’s some kind of weird doll. The scene where she and Hilary arrive at the apartment and the police are there, so she waits in the car, in the half light her face just looked utterly bizarre.

Then there’s the issue of Nicole’s face. It’s just so distracting. She looks less and less like herself, and the weird stiff projecting lips make every profile shot look like she’s some kind of weird doll.

Someone above said that Nicole looks like an AI creation. I disagree somewhat. An AI creation would be more lifelike.

And even despite, or because of, all the 'work' done to her face, she looks way too old to have a 3 year old son. The actor playing her husband is 10 years younger than her. In a way I kind of appreciate this, as it's more usually the other way round, with young actresses cast as much older women or playing alongside much older men. But her weird face just takes me right out of the story.

This week’s episode was quite slow!
what’s with the purple bathtub??

Yes, it was a bit slow. I get the feeling that this is another example of an adaptation being dragged out to fill too many episodes. Nothing much happened in this one. Mercy annoys me. And I really didn't need to see that much of David.

Also not quite sure what's going on with the purple bathtub and Nicole's 'bolt hole' in some anonymous block of flats. I guess we'll find out. Or maybe not.

Watched episode 3. It felt very slow with nothing much happening, like it was just a filler episode with the only points of interest being the dead neighbour and the postcard and a body being found that may be the dead boy. You could have covered that in 10 minutes and left out most of the rest. The purple bathtub is weird as I'm certain Nicole has a much nicer bathroom at her apartment. Why would you rent an apartment just to lie in a much too small plastic bath. Weird.

The point of the apartment is that it’s her place to escape her life. Away from her husband, kids, helper and the whole expat life. The building is the kind of place where nobody she knows would go.

Yes I get that, but why go there to sit in an a large purple plastic washing up bowl. Most people would just sit and think, drink tea, read, sleep. No one I know who has had a bolt hole went there to sit uncomfortably in a too small bath. It just seems odd and unnecessarily theatrical.

It didn’t look too small to me. Odd, yes, because it’s incongruously sitting in an empty room. But to me it doesn’t look like she doesn’t fit in it.

Also, most apartments in Hong Kong don’t have baths, so it’s not a given that she would have a nicer one at home to use.

There are a lot of annoying things about the series, but to me, the bath isn’t one of them.

I’m wondering whether Gus isn’t found - it feels like the whole thing is more a vehicle to consider the different issues of the women in the series. NK’s character has given it all up because of her husband’s career and now lives in a gilded cage, and now has a missing child so is further trapped in HK; Hilary is married to man who has changed his mind about kids after agreeing he didn’t want any, she’s secretly on the pill and he’s having an affair; Mercy is just lost, has run away to HK and doesn’t have money (and has now lost a child); and Essie has no agency whatsoever, a paltry salary and reliant on the family - that sacrifice was particularly poignant.

I’ve just watched the first three episodes and thought that was the last one in the series. I was getting really annoyed at it ending without finding out what happened to Gus but now realise there are three more episodes,
I agree about being distracted by Nicole Kidmans face. I don’t know what she has done to it but she was such a beautiful woman before.

I was living in HK when Expats was filmed, and it caused a huge furore because NK didn’t have to wear a mask or conform to any of the other strict COVID protocols that were in place at the time.

I remember this. She also was given an exemption to quarantine on arrival. At the time everyone else had to do 3 weeks hotel quarantine.

Well today’s episode develops the characters nicely. Going to be getting interesting over the next couple of weeks I reckon!

Yes, that was maybe the best episode yet. No closer to knowing what happened to little Gus however!

Hilary's mum was a bit of a stereotype I thought.

Only two more episodes left?

also enjoying this in some way but also echoing what other people have said, even if she had Gus late say 44/45 and he was 3 and its been a year that puts the character at late forties and she just can't carry that off anymore.

Her cheek fillers looked very, very odd in the police station laughing/ crying sequence.

I’m watching this because I was an expat in HK for 6 years, though not on the income level of Margaret and Hilary and I never had a “helper”. I was there during the 2014 yellow umbrella protests so am looking forward to seeing how that is portrayed.

I also like NK a lot and really wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt but her face looks awful. There was one angle where she was practically the Bride of Wildenstein. I noticed at one point her lips were very similar to Meg Ryan, another woman who really messed up her natural beauty. Though I could actually imagine the Margaret character having that work done so maybe it’s part of the “costume”? (Ha ha)

I was not keen to watch because I knew it involved loss or death of a little boy, and I have my own son so am very sensitive to that sort of thing, but I was too curious about the HK scenes so I steeled myself. Fortunately the acting is so wooden and the kid playing Gus was so annoying that I am not remotely emotionally involved!

That said, I found the scene where David and Mercy were telling “where are you Gus?” in the hotel room utterly utterly bizarre and could not believe the characters would go that far beyond the boundaries of taste. Especially when you saw Mercy later say that David had gone too far when he threw in a comment about her losing the child as part of their “hate you” sex game.

By the way, how fucking stupid do you have to be not to use contraception just because a man tells you he is infertile? (And you can buy the pill OTC in HK so even if she was stupid enough to agree to no condom it would have been very very easy to protect herself).

Also, did I miss it or was there no explanation of how David and Mercy went from him taking care of her the night Gus went missing to them having an affair? Looks like he exploited her vulnerability massively that night, and she somehow thought that seeing a man connected with the child’s family, and that night, was absolutely fine, despite being clearly hugely traumatised by what happened. That’s beyond fucked up.

Also, there is absolutely no shortage of young intelligent attractive girls like Mercy in HK if David fancied that sort of affair. So he’d have to have some weird fetish about Mercy’s connection to his neighbours to decide that she was his chosen bit on the side.

I am quite enjoying the portrayal of the expats as people who shout at locals loudly in English but make no effort to learn the language. That, sadly, is true. Margaret barking about corn syrup in the supermarket was spot on. Having the Brigitte Neilsen lookalike in the lift speak Cantonese, to Hilary’s amazement, was quite funny.

(It is a really hard language, I was never much good at it but I like to think I was never an entitled shouter).