Nicole Kidman and Liev Schreiber lead a spoiled family in a silly murder mystery limited series.
Plot: Amelia Sacks is about to marry into one of the wealthiest families on Nantucket. Her disapproving future mother-in-law, famous novelist Greer Garrison Winbury, has spared no expense in planning what promises to be the premiere wedding of the season — until a body turns up on the beach. As secrets come to light, the stage is set for a real-life investigation that feels plucked from the pages of one of Greer’s novels. Suddenly, everyone is a suspect.
Review: There are so many marquee series to choose from these days that it can be unbearable trying to decide what to watch. From star-studded, acclaimed projects that win countless awards and raise the bar for what long-form storytelling can do to big-budget spectacles that rival the biggest summer blockbuster, there is an option for every taste. But, while there is a time and a place for an elegant meal of fine cuisine, sometimes you want a greasy cheeseburger. It is satisfying and immediate but holds no benefit in the long run. That is exactly what The Perfect Couple is. The latest in the line of soapy drama series that Nicole Kidman has headlined over the last decade, The Perfect Couple is a blend of mystery whodunit with the wealth-porn that has been the core of series like Yellowstone and Succession. A surprisingly funny limited series with an overly complex series of twists, The Perfect Couple is too ridiculous for its own good.
Set on the ultra-rich beachfront of Nantucket, The Perfect Couple centers on the nuptials of Amelia Sacks (Eve Hewson) to Benji Winbury (Billy Howle), the middle child of best-selling novelist Greer Garrison Winbury (Nicole Kidman) and her generationally wealthy husband Tag (Liev Schreiber). Coming from a middle-class family, Amelia is not accustomed to the life of the one-percent Winbury clan, including eldest son Thomas (Jack Reynor) and youngest Will (Sam Nivola). As the preparations are made for Amelia and Benji’s wedding, a murder puts the entire clan into a suspect pool including Thomas’ wife Abby (Dakota Fanning), Benji’s best friend Shooter Dival (Ishaan Khattar), Amelia’s best friend and famous influencer Merritt Monaco (Meghann Fahy), family friend Isabel (Isabelle Adjani), and even the police chief’s daughter, Chloe (Mia Isaac). As Chief Carter (Michael Beach) and Detective Nikki Henry (Donna Lynne Champlin) investigate the murder, secrets and lies begin to unravel, involving every single member of the family and their inner circles.
Over six episodes, the police investigation reveals so many things that most series would have needed twice as many episodes to address. Because The Perfect Couple crams them into a half dozen chapters, you rarely get through an episode without changing your suspect list multiple times. There are extramarital affairs, drugs, hush money, drugs, drinking, cheating, drugs, and the occasional social media meltdown to keep the members of the family at each other’s throats, figuratively and literally. Where a series like Succession mined the verbal abuse lobbed between characters for satirical value, The Perfect Couple seems unsure whether it wants to mock the protagonists. Liev Schreiber plays Tag as a perpetually stoned patriarch who is ignorant of the gravity of what is happening around him and shifts from a figure of prominence to almost a spoof of himself by the end of the series. Jack Reynor and Dakota Fanning are very good at playing spoiled brat adults, while Meghann Fahy does solid work in a role that echoes her turn on The White Lotus. Isabelle Adjani chews the scenery in a supporting role that will hopefully drive many to check out her illustrious filmography, which shows how much great work she has done.
The biggest roles in this series belong to Eve Hewson and Nicole Kidman. Kidman seems to be spending more of her time working on series like this than ever before, with The Perfect Couple fitting right alongside Big Little Lies and Nine Perfect Strangers as another role as an affluent mother and wife whose life is upended by a death. Kidman is good here, as she usually is, but this may be the shallowest of her small-screen leading roles in recent years. Seeing her play off of the actors who portray her family is entertaining, especially when she is opposite Eve Hewson. Hewson, who had a breakout role in The Knick, Bad Sisters, and last year’s Flora and Son, is one of the few characters not born into wealth in this series and sees the rotten core she is preparing to marry into. Kidman and Hewson have two of the least funny roles in the series, which has so many jokes that it made me wonder if this was a drama that was supposed to be funny or a partially dramatic comedy. It is so unevenly handled that it undermines the whole series’s tone.
Based on the book by best-selling novelist Elin Hildebrand, The Perfect Couple was the writer’s first mystery after a successful career in romance novels. Created by Resident Alien actress Jenna Lamia, who wrote or co-wrote all six episodes, The Perfect Couple has a heavy dose of humor that seems at odds with the dark subject matter. The whole series was directed by Susanne Bier, who has done phenomenal work with the film Bird Box and the dramatic series The Night Manager. Bier reunites with Nicole Kidman, whom she directed in The Undoing, another tale of a family torn apart by a heinous crime. While Bier’s previous efforts centered on the characters and the tension of the driving crime, she seems a bit lost in the humor in this adaptation. Playing any of this subject matter as a pitch-black comedy would have been a direction, but everything is so light and breezy that it never feels like the stakes are real. The massive Bollywood-esque dance number that serves as the opening credit sequence for the series is the perfect statement of how manufactured and fake this story is.
There are a lot of moments in this series, especially the entire final episode, where I was laughing at the jokes the characters were delivering. I was not laughing because they were particularly funny but because of how out of place they felt compared to the subject matter. Within any sequence of this series are scenes in which half the actors are playing them as comedy, and the others are playing them as serious, almost as if they are in two different shows. The limited run of six episodes also means that so many elements introduced through the series end up serving little or no purpose at the show’s end. The Perfect Couple is anticlimactic and underwhelming, even if it looks like everyone involved had a lot of fun making it. You will certainly not have as much fun watching it.
The Perfect Couple premieres on September 5th on Netflix.
