What is the plot of Expats, Amazon’s flawed but intriguing new Hong Kong-set limited series? It depends on whom you ask. For the NPR crowd, the show plumbs the “lived experiences” of wealthy foreigners and their servants, meanwhile considering how “feminism [can] undermine issues of race and class,” as creator Lulu Wang recently told the broadcaster. For viewers less soaked in ideology, the program is simpler. It is an examination of grief. A domestic catastrophe has united three women in suffering, and our business is to see whether they emerge. 

That both answers are strictly correct does much to explain the series’s strange unevenness. Sensitively cast and shot, Expats nevertheless can’t decide where its true aim lies. Take, for example, the lead character of Margaret Woo, an anguished housewife played, with characteristic skill, by Nicole Kidman. For long stretches, our protagonist is an avatar of clueless “whiteness,” badgering her Filipina maid even as she insists that the older woman is “family.” Yet Margaret is also, indisputably, a tragic heroine. A better show might have embraced this complexity, suggesting, for instance, that bereavement limits our ability to see others clearly. Expats merely toggles between its two realities, like a bored chauffeur shifting gears. A representative of her “type,” Kidman’s character is an egoist and a mild racist. Unrelatedly, she is also a human being who has been through hell.