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On June 6, the 2024 IndieWire Honors ceremony will celebrate 13 creators and stars responsible for some of the most stellar work of the TV season. Curated and selected by IndieWire’s editorial team, the event is a new edition of previous IndieWire Honors ceremonies, this time focused entirely on television. We’re showcasing their work with new interviews leading up to the Los Angeles celebration.

“Expats,” the immense yet intimate six-part series from director and showrunner Lulu Wang, tells the story of three American women living in Hong Kong who become inextricably linked by tragedy. That loss, so harrowing it’s often kept vague in plot synopses, is the disappearance of a young boy. Left unattended in a crowded night market for a split second, Gus (Connor James) is just gone. There’s no indication if he’s been taken or he merely wandered off. His mother, Margaret (Nicole Kidman), is inconsolable.

Spoiler Alert: The following reveals major plot points from the Prime Video limited series Expats including the finale.

Lulu Wang’s Expats, an adaptation of Janice Y. K. Lee’s novel The Expatriates, concluded its 6-episode run on Friday with the episode aptly titled “Home.” What is home exactly?

The limited series takes viewers on a journey with three central female characters—Margaret Woo (Nicole Kidman), Hilary Starr (Sarayu Blue) and Mercy Cho (Ji-young Yoo)—whose lives become intertwined while they’re expatriates living in Hong Kong.

On the surface, life appears blessed and busy for Americans Margaret and Hilary, two married professionals who require the assistance of one or more helpers to keep their lives running and looking perfect from the outside.

Margaret is married to Clarke (Brian Tee) who is trying to make his way up the corporate ladder while helping to raise their three children: Daisy (Tiana Gowen...

In addition to being a bona fide movie star, Nicole Kidman is also one of the queens of TV right now, producing and starring in everything from Big Little Lies to Nine Perfect Strangers. She adds to her impressive resume with Expats, based on the 2016 novel The Expatriates by Janice Y. K. Lee. In it, Kidman plays Margaret Woo, a woman living in Hong Kong with her family whose life is turned upside-down when her youngest son, Gus (Connor James), tragically disappears. Margaret must grapple with complex feelings of grief, guilt, anger, and hope while navigating complicated interpersonal relationships, including with her husband (Brian Tee), the woman who was supposed to be watching Gus (Ji-young Yoo), and her best friend, Hilary (Sarayu Blue).

Amazon Prime Video's Expats centers around series lead Margaret's missing son, Gus, and some are wondering if he is already dead or not.

Connor James brings Gus to life in Expats, being the youngest son of Nicole Kidman's Margaret.

In the book, the character's name is simply G, but both versions end up missing which sends Margaret and her family into turmoil.

Read full article on The Direct.

At first, it might appear that Amazon Prime Video's Expats is another high-end mystery miniseries starring Nicole Kidman, along the lines of Big Little Lies, Nine Perfect Strangers, and The Undoing. While much of Expats does fit the mold of Kidman's recent TV work, the six-episode series isn't really about the crime at the center of its plot. Kidman's Margaret is determined to find her missing son, but Expats is far less interested in solutions or answers, and anyone looking for a thriller full of clues and suspects will be disappointed. Based on the bestselling novel The Expatriates by Janice Y.K. Lee, Expats is more of a luxurious soap opera than a crime drama, and its meandering focus is one reason it ends up being a disappointment.

Another reason is that Kidman has now played variations on this same fragile upper-class housewife several times, and she doesn't bring a new approach to this particular character.

Compared to the more rigid constraints imposed by a traditional TV network series or feature film, streaming provides as little or as much space as necessary to tell a story. But time and time again, this greater freedom results in a lack of concision, a tendency to get lost in the weeds. The latest example is Lulu Wang’s limited series Expats, which attempts to tell a story that might have worked just fine if it weren’t spread across six episodes.

Expats is adapted from Janice Y.K. Lee’s novel The Expatriates, which traces the lives of three American women living in Hong Kong in 2014. The expat community is represented here by Margaret Woo (Nicole Kidman) and Hilary Starr (Sarayu Blue), who live in a luxury apartment building with their husbands and, in Margaret’s case, children. They have live-in “helpers,” and they attend lavish parties even in the midst of tragedy.