Will ‘Expats’ Get a Second Season To Tie Up All Those Loose Ends?
Watching the Prime Video original miniseries Expats feels like an ongoing meditation on love, loss, grief, and especially guilt. These are complex emotions to explore on screen or off, and the first season of Expats concluded with more questions than answers.
With so much unfinished business, viewers seeking closure are wondering if a second season might be in the works.
Like many recent television shows, Expats was adapted from a book called The Expatriates by Janice Y.K. Lee. Showrunner Lulu Wang penned the adapted script and directed all six episodes, which premiered on Amazon Prime Video on January 26, 2024 and ran through February 23. While it’s not unheard of for a miniseries based on a novel to get a second season (Big Little Lies, anyone?), the book’s conclusion tied up the story more completely than the more open-ended series. After the season one finale entitled “Home” ended, audiences were left asking what’s next.
How did season one end?
Spoilers for season 1 of Expats ahead!
Expats is about three American women living abroad in Hong Kong. Their lives intertwine when Margaret (Nicole Kidman) and her husband Clarke (Brian Tee) suffer an unimaginable tragedy: Their youngest son Gus goes missing at a crowded night market. The disappearance happened after Margaret, jealous of the close bond her children share with their live-in nanny, took the kids to the market with a new friend she’d just met, a young woman named Mercy (Ji-young Yoo), who believes she was born cursed with bad luck.
After Gus goes missing, both Margaret and Mercy are plunged into a world of self-doubt, painful memories, and all-consuming guilt. Margaret becomes unhinged and suspects everyone around her, and Mercy is self-destructive and starts an affair with David (Jack Huston), who is married to Hilary Starr (Sarayu Blue). Hilary is conflicted when David becomes a suspect in Gus’s disappearance; she knows their marriage is on the rocks, and she feels pressured by her traditional Indian parents to have a baby .. but she doesn’t want one.
In the end, Mercy discovers she is pregnant with David’s baby, but she does not want a relationship with him. David and Hilary decide to get divorced, and Hilary returns to the U.S. to confront her dying father for his decades of pressure, abuse, and infidelity towards her mother. Mercy, meanwhile, makes amends with her own controlling mother, who agrees to help her raise her daughter. As for Margaret, she finally comes to grips with the loss of her son, which remains unsolved—however, she’s still not ready to give up on finding him. The rest of her family packs up and moves back to America, but at the last minute she decides not to get on the plane. She simply can’t leave Hong Kong while her son is still missing.
For those wondering, the book ended with all three women coming together to help Mercy raise her baby. It’s a satisfying conclusion that wraps up the story, which is not what showrunner Lulu Wang was going for at all. She told TODAY that she wanted her show’s ending to illustrate that life doesn’t always give us the closure we desire. “Because I think that’s the way life works,” she said, adding, “Oftentimes, we don’t get closure, we don’t get to say goodbye.”
Does the ending leave room for a second season?
Sadly, it appears that the answer is no. Wang created the show knowing it would be a miniseries, and she has expressed no plans to flesh out the storylines no matter how rife they are for exploration. She believes that the show’s ambiguous ending demonstrates that the characters must move on with their lives in spite of everything that’s unresolved. To put it simply, Wang wrote Expats like it was “a complete thing,” although she admits she’ll “Never say never. That’s my rule.”
So we can still hope! In the meantime, you can catch up on all six episodes of Expats on Amazon Prime.
(featured image: Prime Video)
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