Amazon’s ‘Expats’ Was Filmed in Hong Kong, But People Can’t Watch It There

At the height of Hong Kong’s Covid restrictions, the government gave Nicole Kidman and several others a rare exemption from the weeks of hotel quarantine required for travelers so that they could film a series about the malaise of privileged expatriates.

That series from Amazon Prime, “Expats,” which stars Ms. Kidman, aired its first two episodes last week in what it described as a worldwide release. For Hong Kong viewers, they appeared as “currently unavailable.”

The reasons are unknown. Amazon Studios declined to comment. A spokesman for the Hong Kong government said it had facilitated the filming of some street scenes in “Expats” but would not comment on the “operational arrangement of individual businesses.”

The show is being released after several years of transformation in the city, a Chinese territory. Hong Kong was largely closed off to the world during three years of pandemic restrictions, and speech and dissent have become severely restricted after a mass protest movement was squashed in 2019.

Based on Janice Y.K. Lee’s novel “The Expatriates,” the show follows three American women living in the freer Hong Kong of 2014. Street protests demanding more democratic elections took over major roads in the city for months that year. Scenes from the show depict demonstrations from that movement, known as the Umbrella Revolution.

In 2019, Hong Kong was swept again by months of mass protests, which sometimes turned violent, and Beijing imposed a national security law on the city the following year. In 2021, the authorities enacted a law allowing censors to ban the screening of films deemed to be “contrary to national security interests.”

Though the censorship law does not directly apply to online streaming, episodes of other shows with politically sensitive speech are notably absent from streaming services in the city. Two episodes of “The Simpsons” — one ridiculing government censorship efforts and another referring to “forced labor” in China — are not available on the Disney+ streaming service in Hong Kong.

Tenky Tin Kai-man, the former chairman of the Federation of Hong Kong Filmmakers, suggested that producers might have decided not to release “Expats” in Hong Kong to avoid running afoul of local laws about depicting protests.

In an interview with the BBC, the show’s director, Lulu Wang, said that she had worked with legal teams to determine which protest-related elements could be shown and that the protest scenes had been filmed in Los Angeles. She indicated she was concerned about any consequences the production could have for Hong Kong residents who worked on it.

“You have to do it responsibly also, and there’s so many people who are working on it who live in Hong Kong,” she said. “But it was very important to me to be able to show this particular moment in this year in Hong Kong very accurately.”

When “Expats” was being filmed, travelers to Hong Kong were required to quarantine for weeks in a hotel. Ms. Kidman and four crew members were granted an exemption, the government said at the time, to perform “designated professional work,” describing it as necessary to the local economy.

The special treatment angered residents, who saw it as unfair and an example of the type of privilege the show said it would examine. The exemption was also criticized at the time by Hong Kong lawmakers, including Michael Tien, who publicly questioned why Ms. Kidman should be given special treatment.

On Monday, Mr. Tien said it didn’t matter that the show was not accessible in Hong Kong because the hope was that Ms. Kidman’s star power could raise the stature of Hong Kong elsewhere.

“It’s more important for the series to be streamed overseas than it is to be streamed in Hong Kong,” he said on Monday.

The city’s top leader, John Lee, has in recent years embarked on a campaign to “tell the Hong Kong story well” and has been trying to draw celebrities to the city since pandemic restrictions were dropped in 2023.

Dominic Lee, a lawmaker who leads a nongovernment online coalition that seeks to challenge criticism of China, said on Monday that the government should have done more to determine whether Hong Kong would be portrayed in a flattering light before granting quarantine exemptions.

Mr. Tin, of the filmmakers federation, said he had sought an explanation from people associated with “Expats” for its absence from Hong Kong but hadn’t gotten a response. “Since it was filmed in Hong Kong, Hong Kong audiences would also want a chance to watch it,” he said.