The Review: 'The Perfect Couple' Builds a Fluffy Yet Forgettable Mystery
Nicole Kidman rounds out a charming ensemble cast for this predictable whodunit that's as bubbly, bright, and buoyant fun as a glass of champagne, but occasionally, as grating as a prosecco hangover.
Welcome back to Top Shelf, Low Brow. This is The Review, a regular edition that looks closer at movies, music, and television. This time it’s Nicole Kidman’s latest streaming limited series, The Perfect Couple, which manages to find something most of Kidman’s TV roles haven’t: a consistent tone!
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Nicole Kidman stars in a limited series, based on a popular book, set in an aspirational location. Her character is clever, enigmatic, disgustingly rich, and does not share Kidman’s own Australian accent. This woman’s intriguing nature belies some puzzling secrets that everyone around her is trying to figure out when, suddenly, someone dies! What a tragedy, almost as tragic as how predictable and trite these once-thrilling shows have come to feel as we spend the next six to eight episodes finding out what happened through a series of gnarled timelines and flashbacks.
Gone are the days when we could tune into the latest in this micro-genre that Kidman has carved out for herself and anticipate something truly compelling. If those expectations weren’t dashed by the far inferior second season of Big Little Lies, 2020’s The Undoing and 2022’s Nine Perfect Strangers were waiting in the wings to admonish you for holding out hope. Kidman has been a risk-taker for her entire career, but her forays into television have been consistently disappointing in ways that her filmography has not. Even when the output deviates slightly from this form, as was the case with January’s Expats, it’s not enough to constitute a dramatic risk. Kidman has settled herself into this strange, niche space, where thematic patterns and narrative twists are easy to guess by simply examining whatever limited series came before the newest one. It’s strangely conventional for an actress who has made a career out of being unpredictable.
Kidman’s latest, The Perfect Couple, which is adapted from Elin Hilderbrand’s novel of the same name, premieres Sept. 5 on Netflix and follows the actor’s favorite story model. Famed mystery writer Greer Garrison Winbury (Kidman) can’t outrun the mistakes of her past, and—surprise, surprise—the consequences have come to muck up her present. The sense of inevitability is hard to shake, especially because the series makes little effort to distinguish itself from Kidman’s past efforts. Initially, The Perfect Couple appears to be a Frankensteined hodgepodge of Big Little Lies and The Undoing, right down to sharing the former’s narrative structure of communicating information through interviews with detectives
But there can be comfort in the familiar, too, and it’s when The Perfect Couple lulls you into its recognizable rhythm that it shakes up the grab bag of plot points and manages to change course. Though it’s far from inventive, the series is pulpy fun, dropping the unnecessarily sober tone of other recent streaming efforts to play up its own ridiculousness. Kidman might lead the charge, but she’s backed by a talented ensemble who each know exactly what buttons to push and which character tropes to lean into to keep this family soap good and lathered, with enough foam and froth to disguise the killer’s identity until the very end.
To get to that sweet stretch, The Perfect Couple first forces you to endure an almost unforgivable opening episode as its ensemble descends onto Greer’s Nantucket compound for a Fourth of July wedding celebration. Greer and her husband, Tag (Liev Schreiber), welcome a house full of guests for their prodigal son Benji’s (Billy Howle) marriage to his fiancée, Amelia (Eve Hewson). Along for the ride are Benji’s brothers Will (Sam Nivola) and Thomas (Jack Reynor), Thomas’ wife Abby (Dakota Fanning), family friends Shooter (Ishaan Khattar) and Isabel (thee Isabelle Adjani), Amelia’s humble, unsuspecting parents Bruce (Michael McGrady) and Karen (Dendrie Taylor), and her loyal best friend, Merritt (Meghann Fahy).
The show’s many characters eventually prove to be one of its strongest suits, but in this first of six installments, they are shuffled through scenes like producers pushing people into the frame to hit their mark. Things become muddled fast, and paying attention to the setup of The Perfect Couple’s larger plot is increasingly difficult when you spend so much time asking, “Who’s that person? And what’s their relationship to that guy?” As it turns out, none of that matters all that much. All you need to know is that everyone has a plausible motive for murder, and that even the most tightly wound and picture-perfect in Greer’s brood aren’t beyond unraveling.
The fall happens fast when a dead body washes ashore on the Garrison-Winbury property on the morning of Amelia and Benji’s wedding, and in the aftermath, the show’s focus blessedly tightens up. Greer, prim and proper, insists that things carry on as normal as possible so as not to distract from her new book's impending launch (strangely planned on the same holiday weekend as her son’s wedding—way to hog the spotlight!). That’s normal to the Winburys and their friends, who have spent their lives throwing enough money at a problem to make it go away. But it strikes Amelia as odd. She grew up sans silver spoon, far from the sandy beaches and crystal blue waters of Nantucket, and Amelia’s natural skepticism of Greer’s methods unspools the secrets that the Winburys have been holding onto so tight.
What initially appears to be a hackneyed commentary on class politics soon reveals itself to be a clever way to establish the series’ stakes. Money is power, sure, but so is knowledge, and everyone under Greer’s roof has one or the other. Well, except Tag, who spends most of the show with a joint in his mouth to dull Greer’s intensity. (Though who among us would complain at the sight of Liev Schrieber’s hairy chest on full display while he takes a puff or two.) The Perfect Couple curiously explores the differences between what wealth and intelligence can afford us, suggesting that the two things are mutually exclusive enough to illicit homicidal envy in anybody if pushed to their limit.
Fresh from her excellent turn in Bad Sisters, Hewson gives the show just the right amount of emotional gravity to make these thorny ideas work. She plays the waning “eat the rich” trope for all its worth, demonstrating that no amount of money is worth holding onto if it means being disconnected from the people you love. As Amelia’s foil, Kidman remains as watchable as ever while Greer tiptoes through her messes, doling out some wicked one-liners along the way. (“I don’t think golf is the kind of thing you really pick up” is a nasty thing to say to a man whose daughter is about to marry your son.) Her expressions of fright and exasperation as tensions rise may be recycled from every other limited series Kidman has done, but they’re magnified by some surprising stylistic choices that set The Perfect Couple apart from her other television work.
The most baffling (and, truthfully, beguiling ) is the show’s decision to chop and screw its title theme into the score. That might not seem that strange on its face, but how many shows do you know that feature a Meghan Trainor song over a corny dance sequence that turns out to be the show’s main theme? The massive ensemble cast, Kidman and all, gather on the beach to do a choreographed number to Trainor’s “Criminals,” the melody from which is then used throughout the series, with Trainor’s distorted vocals warbling over its most tense scenes. It’s a peculiar choice and a big swing—one has to imagine how hysterical it would be had the music supervisors gone with a different Trainor tune, subjecting us to the muffled cries of, “I could have my Gucci on…” over glimpses of affluent backstabbing. But it oddly works, and makes the show feel all the more distinct.
While Nine Perfect Strangers dialed down the inherent absurdity of its plot and made the show nearly unwatchable, The Perfect Couple fluffs its silliness to great heights. This is a limited series that knows it needn’t be anything more than what its source novel was: a beach read. The lack of pretension elevates The Perfect Couple to a fun, perfectly forgettable affair, as champagne-soaked and fatuous as any rich person’s Nantucket wedding weekend should be.
