Anyone watching this? The first two episodes premiered over the weekend. I thought it was pretty good and am interested to see where this goes. Is it going to be a show about coping with trauma or are they going to get into the mystery of what happened to Nicole Kidman's son?

Had to go look up the trailer.

On one hand it could be very interesting.
On the other hand, due to personal experiences, I might not be able to watch it.

I recently finished all the Bosch and Bosch Legacy so I'm in the market for something new.

After 1 episode, the Expat way of life in Asia appears to be reasonably accurate.

The scenes out on the street in Hong Kong look pretty accurate. I made several trips to Hong Kong in 2019. One of the biggest surprises I found was the large number of Filipino workers there.

The family dynamics are interesting and I'm looking forward to seeing how it plays out. Will probably watch Ep 2 tonight.

planning on living in Europe starting July 2026 for about a year

am I going to still want to do that after watching this series?

Nicole Kidman got that creepy face where it looks like she cut off a mannequin's face and transplanted it onto hers.

Watched Ep 2 and a few things that rang true:

The father's contract extension. Very common for once an employer gets you in country, if you're any good, they don't want to let you leave.

The Expat boat party. My Aussie mates have posted many pics of exactly those types of excursions.

There was one part where there was dialogue in English spoken by a "Honkey" and the accent was perfect.

Also, I loved the scene in the "Hot Pot" restaurant along with copious amounts of TsingTao they've been drinking in the first two episodes.

LMCane said:

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planning on living in Europe starting July 2026 for about a year

am I going to still want to do that after watching this series?

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I've lived in Mexico, Guatemala, Cambodia, and Colombia over the last 12 years. You'll be fine! I think episode 3 drops tonight or tomorrow.

LMCane said:

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planning on living in Europe starting July 2026 for about a year

am I going to still want to do that after watching this series?

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I lived in Germany for about 8 months. It takes a little bit to get adjusted to doing the daily things (grocery shopping being a key one) a bit differently, but you'll settle in.

If you're going to a country where English isn't widely spoken or the primary language, my advice is to start learning some of the basics now. Learn the numbers to 100 so you know when you're buying something and there's no digital readout, you know how much the total is. Learn the words for different foods (beef, chicken, fish, potatoes, etc) so you know how to read a menu and know what you're eating. Most menus don't have pictures! Learn basic greetings and directional information. These things will help you when you are out and about and hit the ground running a bit better. The rest you can pick up as you go by listening or watching tv that has subtitles. Doesn't matter if the subtitles are in their language or English because you'll pick up little bits each time.

Watched Ep 3 last night.

Regarding vacation to Thailand. When traveling to some of the vacation destinations where you don't speak the language, it is really easy to let your guard down, especially when you're being waited on hand and foot. And it's easy to feel like royalty or something with all the peasants essentially - beneath you.

One of the main characters, I think it was "Hilary", said something to the effect that, this life isn't real, it's artificial. That's very true except that it is real. Having grown up as an Expat kid in Saudi Arabia, I was able to do things like travel to destinations that most people only dream of. In their case in Hong Kong, the amount of staff they're able to have and the ladies just existing as "wives" is exactly how it used to be for the women married to men who were on "family status" for some expatriate assignment.

One of the things to keep in mind for this show is that these men are ballers for whatever it is that they do (which hasn't really been disclosed). They're not some mid-level assistant to the regional manager, they're execs of some sort and execs that they can't find in-country.

I guess another part to consider is that for the women in the show, their existence is tied to their husband. They're essentially an accessory and if they were to get divorced, they have no legal standing on their own. They'd have to go back to wherever they came from. They couldn't just hang out in HK, get an apartment and collect alimony or something.

Episode 3 has a shopping scene which highlights how different it was for my wife and kids when we lived in Australia because we were not Expats, rather I was hired as an immigrant so we didn't have any of what I'll call - Expat Support. The American foods and things that we missed are available in places like Hong Kong, Singapore, Dubai and most of the Gulf States but, they're not available in Australia. My wife wanted to bake a pecan pie and I was able to find a single store in North Sydney that stocked about 3 bottles of Karo syrup for a few years. It's little things like that which are part of everyday life that add to the struggle of living overseas as an American (or Westerner, Australians included).

Watched Ep 4 last night. Very dark.

While I'm finding Nicole Kidman's character to be extremely annoying, I haven't lost a child so I can't fault her character too much.

One of the things I really enjoy about this show is how authentic many of the details are. A few that stuck out for me are:

• How dirty the Korean girl's apartment is.
• The Mandarin speakers and the Cantonese speakers not speaking to each other.
• The fact that most of the Expats could be there for several years and not learn any of the basic phrases in the local language.
• The discussions about going home.

What I've found is that people will help you move to a foreign country but they won't help you move back "home".

I think this series is doing a good job of showing some of those conversations and the conflict about what we should do as a family. On one hand there is opportunity but on the other hand, you're missing family and the comforts of home. And of course the longer you stay, the harder it is to make the change.

This show is very aptly named and I'm liking the authentic nature of the experience. Very relatable.

I am enjoying it a lot, but I found almost all of these characters completely unlikeable. The only one I can stand is Hilary. I am looking forward to seeing where this goes over the last two episodes.

HollywoodBQ said:

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After 1 episode, the Expat way of life in Asia appears to be reasonably accurate.

The scenes out on the street in Hong Kong look pretty accurate. I made several trips to Hong Kong in 2019. One of the biggest surprises I found was the large number of Filipino workers there.

The family dynamics are interesting and I'm looking forward to seeing how it plays out. Will probably watch Ep 2 tonight.

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My wife's fam is from Korea and we have some white friends who actually lived over there for a few years. My wife has never been so she was curious to get their thoughts. They loved a lot about it, even though they found a lot of it to be overtly racist AF by our standards. Said the husband was treated with some level of respect for the most part or just ignored, but that the lady was treated with hostility at times by middle aged Korean females...scowls, shoves, cutting her in line and letting her know about it etc.

They are racist against other Asian groups as well (and vice versa), but if you have any foreigner blood, you will never be considered a Korean...even if you somehow can obtain citizenship. My half-Korean daughter basically has tainted blood and even if she relocated to Korea well before having children, her offspring could never be considered to be Korean...they would always be "lesser than". You would think such a proud nationalist/xenophobic nation would not have the lowest birth rate in the world. They may not even really exist in 100 years.

I chuckle any time people from these countries say America is a racist place. That being said, my grandfather worked several extended antenna projects there back in the 60's or 70's and he absolutely loved it...said the rural people were so accommodating and hospitable, but I think he was just in and out of Seoul...so maybe there's a city vs rural element at play as well?

TXCityAggie said:

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I am enjoying it a lot, but I found almost all of these characters completely unlikeable. The only one I can stand is Hilary. I am looking forward to seeing where this goes over the last two episodes.

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I agree that all of the characters are pretty unlikeable.
Hilary has had a couple of positive moments but otherwise, I don't care for her character either.

El Gallo Blanco said:

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HollywoodBQ said:

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After 1 episode, the Expat way of life in Asia appears to be reasonably accurate.

The scenes out on the street in Hong Kong look pretty accurate. I made several trips to Hong Kong in 2019. One of the biggest surprises I found was the large number of Filipino workers there.

The family dynamics are interesting and I'm looking forward to seeing how it plays out. Will probably watch Ep 2 tonight.

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My wife's fam is from Korea and we have some white friends who actually lived over there for a few years. My wife has never been so she was curious to get their thoughts. They loved a lot about it, even though they found a lot of it to be overtly racist AF by our standards. Said the husband was treated with some level of respect for the most part or just ignored, but that the lady was treated with hostility at times by middle aged Korean females...scowls, shoves, cutting her in line and letting her know about it etc.

They are racist against other Asian groups as well (and vice versa), but if you have any foreigner blood, you will never be considered a Korean...even if you somehow can obtain citizenship. My half-Korean daughter basically has tainted blood and even if she relocated to Korea well before having children, her offspring could never be considered to be Korean...they would always be "lesser than". You would think such a proud nationalist/xenophobic nation would not have the lowest birth rate in the world. They may not even really exist in 100 years.

I chuckle any time people from these countries say America is a racist place. That being said, my grandfather worked several extended antenna projects there back in the 60's or 70's and he absolutely loved it...said the rural people were so accommodating and hospitable, but I think he was just in and out of Seoul...so maybe there's a city vs rural element at play as well?

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Yeah, funny how here in the USA, we lump 2 Billion people into one group called "Asian" and we don't know how to classify another 2 Billion people who might be called "Desi" in the Indian Subcontinent and surrounding areas.

But yeah, to the various Asian groups, they don't necessarily get along with other Asian groups. And a lot of other more intricate discrimination that we as foreigners can't even see. Some of that is actually brought up in the movie "Crazy Rich Asians".

Regarding your daughter's Korean status, I get it. I saw a funny one kind of like that with a friend of mine who is Swiss. He was really emotionally torn up when his son was 4 years old and he was living in Denver. He told me that if he didn't move back to Switzerland and have his son enter school at age 5, that in Swiss society, his son would never be considered Swiss. So that was a social consideration versus a genetic one.

And of course in California, with the Chinese community, we had the "ABCs" versus the "FOBs".

Watched Ep. 5 last night.

I'm glad to see they're mentioning the Political unrest which was going hot and heavy when I was there in 2019. I even accidentally walked right into the middle of a protest one night next to my hotel in Causeway Bay.

This episode was pretty depressing overall.

In a way, it was nice to see the character development of the "help". But, it was also really depressing consider how "we" (expats) treat the category of people that we used to call "TCNs" when I was a kid in Saudi Arabia.

TCN - stood for Third Country National. And the use of the term was discouraged as it usually had negative connotations associated with us first-world people looking down on the third-world. But it was a useful term to describe people who were not from the host country, not from the privileged high end worker class (like the men in this show) but people who were also Expats but were brought in for unskilled / semi-skilled labor.

A few scenes that stuck out were:

• Wiring money back to family in the home country
• The "help" getting together for recreation (and gossip)

Thought episode 5 was excellent.

Agreed. Best of the season so far.

Looking forward to the finale to see where this goes. I can't decide if I hate Mercy or David more...they're both insufferable.

Watched the finale last night.

It was nice to see an episode that had sunlight in it after how dark the last two episodes were.

Ending that artificial Expat life and returning to reality is a tough transition, especially for kids. This is why the connections to my childhood Saudi friends are more important to me than the connection to my fish buddies from the Corps of Cadets.

In this episode, the kids acted up but I think they could have delved a lot more into their reluctance to leave their friends behind.

When I left Australia, I was long overdue to come home permanently. I had been traveling to the USA for work, approximately every three months for a decade so I wasn't unfamiliar. As a kid in Saudi Arabia, we came home every year so we weren't completely disconnected from the USA but there certainly were cultural knowledge gaps (for example, I never saw the "Where's the Beef" commercial).

One of the things the Hong Kong girl said to Mercy was dead on though. "You're lucky, you have an American Passport, you can just leave any time".

That is so true. But true to form as with many Americans, Mercy had no appreciation for what that actually meant.

I worked with 2 guys from Hong Kong who left after 2019. Since they were closer to my age, they had UK Passports and were able to immigrate to Australia and the UK. But that was a tough decision for both of them, to leave behind the country they grew up in.

The guy who went to the UK was very involved in the HK Democracy movement. He even sent me to some web sites to talk about what they were doing, how they organized the protests, etc. Very interesting stuff.

One thing that was funny was when they referred to the white guy as being a Gweilo.
Back in 2019, when I was in HK, the guy who moved to the UK took me up in the Sky100 tower and bought me a beer called Gwei-Lo. And then laughed hilariously.

Caught the trailer and was intrigued but then saw the lowish 6.0 IMDB rating. Worth a binge?

Teddy Perkins said:

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Caught the trailer and was intrigued but then saw the lowish 6.0 IMDB rating. Worth a binge?

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haven't watched the last episode yet so I'll hold off on a final recommendation.

I've liked it so far. A little uneven at times, and Nicole Kidman's character will drive you up the wall (but understandably).

I will say that 6.0 on IMDB was up there even when they had only dropped 2 episodes so I'm not sure what it's really based on. It's a better show than most of the stuff I've watched lately.

Teddy Perkins said:

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Caught the trailer and was intrigued but then saw the lowish 6.0 IMDB rating. Worth a binge?

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I've watched it week by week as it was released so I had time each week for it to rest and develop.
I wouldn't binge it in one sitting, probably 5-6 hours total.

If you peel off one episode every day, that would probably work.
A couple of the episodes are really dark and leave you feeling kind of icky afterwards. So, a day apart would be enough to recover.

really enjoyed the series and thought they did a nice job on the final episode.