My Take | Nicole Kidman has become the femme fatale for Hong Kong officials
- Mega-starred series Expats keeps generating controversies, with the latest being allegations of censorship as the city’s viewers can’t watch two premiered episodes
It’s hard to resist the star power of someone like Nicole Kidman. So it was perhaps understandable that Hong Kong officials controversially granted her exemption, along with some of her crew, from tough quarantine rules in August 2021, during the filming of Expats.
The Amazon series has just premiered its first two episodes, and it has already started a new row. No doubt local officials have been regretting her preferential treatment.
The government claimed at the time that the show would carry out “designated professional work” contributing to “the growth of Hong Kong’s economy”. But it’s not even being aired in the city, at least for now. And the story certainly doesn’t put Hong Kong in a very good light.
A tragedy – spoiler alert! – involving an expatriate child being stolen or kidnapped in a busy nighttime street market is not the kind of crime that one of the world’s safest cities is known for.
Critics also have called out the show for glossing over the city’s political upheavals of recent years. Yet, major foreign news platforms have claimed in their reports that the show not being locally available could be due to political censorship. Who’s right?
There was a forgettable 10-second sequence in the first episode in which a few lonely protesters marched and shouted without much enthusiasm political slogans that vaguely sounded like those from the so-called umbrella mass protests in 2014. If that was what the censors fretted about, they really shouldn’t have.
