Spoiler Warning: This piece discusses major plot points from the first episode of ‘The Season’
Set in the glittering world of Hong Kong’s ultra-wealthy, ‘The Season’ opens on the city’s social elite gearing up for boating season: an opulent maze of parties, alliances and family expectations, with newcomer Cola (Jessie Mei Li) pulled into the orbit of the city’s most powerful.
Across one visually lush episode, the pilot sketches out rivalries, generational tension and the weight of legacy and status, while gradually suggesting that Cola is carrying more secrets than she lets on. Immediately, it invites rather pale comparisons to ‘Crazy Rich Asians’ by way of ‘The White Lotus,’ with the stakes rooted in a very specific vision of Hong Kong high society.
‘The Season’ is available to watch on Now TV, Viu, Hulu and Disney+.
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Hong Kong Always Looks Good On Camera
If there’s one thing ‘The Season’ nails straight out of the gate, it’s the look. The series’ pilot is packed with spectacular visuals, not just of the manicured lawns of hilltop mansions, harbour views at golden hour and gleaming hotel interiors, but also grittier, tungsten-lit montages of street-level Hong Kong.
The camera glides through Central streets, gated compounds and dramatic staircases with a confident sweep. It knows Hong Kong is cinematic even when it’a simply pointing at a street corner, and it knows exactly when to hold the frame.
That said, filming Hong Kong for the screen is a bit of a cheat code. It’s genuinely hard to shoot this city and not end up with something visually arresting, so beautiful frames alone cannot carry the show. What stands out here is how the pilot occasionally uses that sheen to underline its class divide – how the skyline looms behind a conversation about legacy, or how a long taxi ride carries a character through the city to somewhere the ultra-wealthy can only imagine.
While it’s a cinematically rich first episode, the series has to earn the right to be more than just a very expensive mood board.
Still Searching For Its Tone
The immediate comparisons are obvious: ‘Crazy Rich Asians’ for its ultra-wealthy Asian family drama, and ‘The White Lotus’ for its mix of privilege, performance and slow-burn mystery. The key difference – at least in this pilot – is that those projects treat their archetypes as starting points, then either dig into them or commit to pushing them into full-on camp.
In ‘The Season,’ the characters mostly feel like genre staples arranged on a fancy chessboard: the icy matriarch, the ambitious outsider, the reckless heir. They are recognisable, but not yet recognisably human.
That hollowness unfortunately bleeds into the acting. You can feel the strain of exposition in almost every conversation, with characters explaining who they are to each other rather than simply existing in the same world. In other words: a whole lot of telling, and not enough showing.
It gives much of the episode’s performances a slightly wooden quality that’s hard to ignore. You cannot always be sure if an odd line reading is a knowing camp choice or just an actor trying to wrangle a clunky chunk of set-up. At least for this pilot, you hope it was a choice.
The series also does not yet seem to know whether it wants to embrace its dramatics or play everything straight. Some moments feel pitched for heightened, soapy fun, while others aim for prestige-drama sincerity, and the two modes do not quite reconcile.
The repeated mentions of ‘the season’ throughout the episode’s dialogue are a perfect example. With the uneven tone of the pilot, hearing multiple characters earnestly drop the title starts to feel less like world-building and more like the show is underlining its own premise in permanent marker. It wouldn’t be as distracting if everything else felt more lived-in.
Cola Starts To Get Interesting…And So Might The Show?
The good news is that by the end of the pilot, ‘The Season’ does start to find something more intriguing to hold onto. The very obvious hints that Cola is not just a wide-eyed newcomer – that she has a past, a plan, or at least a complicated relationship with this world – finally give the story some much-needed depth and forward momentum.
The moment the show stops telling us who everyone is and starts letting the characters become fully fledged beings, the whole thing feels less like a glossy teaser and more like the beginning of a genuine story.
There may be a version of ‘The Season’ that lets its visuals, setting and mystery do more of the talking, trusting the actors to fill in the gaps instead of making them carry heavy set-up in every scene. If later episodes either loosen up or pull back and let the characters feel like actual people rather than beautifully dressed archetypes, this could evolve into something interesting.
While it’s a given that a series pilot needs to lay the groundwork for what is to come, it should do so in a way that actually catches the viewer, not leave them with one foot out the door by the time the credits roll.
As it stands, the pilot of ‘The Season’ is a visually handsome but slightly shallow introduction, with an interesting hook peeking through. It just needs its people to feel as real as the city it’s set in.
Born in Korea and raised in Hong Kong, Min Ji has combined her degree in anthropology and creative writing with her passion for going on unsolicited tangents as an editor at Friday Club. In between watching an endless amount of movies, she enjoys trying new cocktails and pastas while occasionally snapping a few pictures.
