Director: Lulu Wang
Inside the polished expatriate bubble of Hong Kong, an ordinary afternoon outing goes wrong, and the fallout quietly rewires every friendship it touches.
What is The Expats about?
The Expats follows a tight circle of American wives living in Hong Kong's expatriate community, where imported comfort sits close to isolation. When a moment of carelessness during a shared outing changes several families forever, the friendships holding this group together are tested against guilt, class and cultural distance. Told from multiple points of view across its episodes, the series lets grief and secrecy ripple outward slowly rather than rushing toward a single reveal, spending as much time on manicured apartments and staff quarters as on the quiet resentments between the women at its center.
Cast & crew
Nicole Kidman leads as a mother whose ordered life starts to come apart, with Sarayu Blue and Ji-young Yoo playing women in her circle whose own stories intersect with hers in ways the series reveals gradually. Brian Tee, Tiana Gowen, Bodhi del Rosario, Ruby Ruiz and Amelyn Pardenilla fill out a supporting cast that includes both expatriate families and the domestic staff whose lives run parallel to theirs.
Context & significance
Directed by Lulu Wang, known for close observation of family and class dynamics, The Expats arrived in 2024 as a limited thriller series rather than an ongoing show, with each episode built around a different vantage point on the same unfolding crisis. Its Hong Kong setting is treated as more than backdrop; the city's layered mix of wealth, migration and domestic labor shapes every relationship on screen, and the pacing favors patient character study over conventional thriller momentum.
Where & how to watch
The Expats is available on K-Time with Farsi subtitles, letting viewers follow its dialogue-heavy, slow-building plot in Persian. This page is free to browse; watching the series itself only requires logging into a free K-Time account, on a platform built around Farsi navigation for Persian-speaking viewers wherever they live.