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Expats Series-Premiere Recap: Unhappy Together
Lulu Wang’s Hong Kong–set drama series kicks off with a riveting chapter.
The episode’s prologue features static video portraits of people in tragic news stories — or perhaps anecdotes or urban legends à la Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia — as the voice of Mercy (Ji-young Yoo) narrates the injuries, deaths, and familial suffering each of them accidentally caused. A drawing of someone holding Jesus’s hand is hardly a subtle indicator of what might’ve happened to them — as is the case here, even a child’s understanding of religious imagery is geared toward euphemistic comfort — but could the answer to his whereabouts also be the root of why Margaret seems to resent religion? She’s grown distant from her husband, David (Jack Huston), who has a drinking problem and, likely unbeknownst to her, is having an affair with Mercy, a young Korean American woman who isn’t as well-off as the other characters and fits in awkwardly with her posh friends.
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