Nothing says hello, autumn, like a six-part mystery drama. Last week, Netflix’s adaptation of The Perfect Couple, a novel by Elin Hilderbrand, hit the streamer with much fanfare, following the kill-someone-and-get-away-with-it-rich mega-author Greer Garrison Winbury (Nicole Kidman) as she manages a Nantucket wedding party for her prodigal son Benji’s marriage to the saucer-eyed and heaving-bosomed Amelia. As we bask in the lavish coastal lives of the hyper-wealthy, somebody gets bumped off, leaving a Cobb salad of suspects. The groom has two brothers: Thomas (Jack Reynor, resurrected from a midsummer ritual), with his pregnant wife, Abby (Fanning-elder Dakota), and Will, on the angry cusp of 18 and sweet on a waitress. There’s Greer’s chain-weed-smoking husband, Tag (Liev Schreiber), a gruff-ass detective, a wedding planner, a book agent. A Broderick Graham keeps calling the house. As tensions build, there’s prescription roulette, a bloody shucker, a very long long boat, a beach bludgeoning, and an $18,000 bracelet. Greer is predominantly livid that her son is marrying a pauper—even the housekeeper sneers at her parents’ fruit basket—until the body washes up on the shore.
Meghann Fahy, whose vacation at The White Lotus appears to have aged her backwards, is a standout as maid of honor Merritt, who at first seems to have no ties to anyone else in the family. I have found myself obsessed with Isabel (Isabelle Adjani), a Frenchwoman who was apparently reared from birth in the sexually aggressive red light of the Moulin Rouge sign, imparting your-gonads-versus-your-heart idioms to anyone who’ll listen.
Nicole Kidman is catnip for gay men. She’s one of a dying breed of Hollywood actresses who take their work incredibly seriously, and we support it, but she also often enters the realm of meme-able campness. (Please refer to her leaving the divorce office post-Tom, and her clapping at the Oscars, and her frankly transcendent AMC ad.) We both love her and love to send her up. In The Perfect Couple, her intimidating blow-dry is full of secrets, and though the drama isn’t The Hours and isn’t The Others, Kidman returns to her recent niche of hyper-rich blondes adjacent to murder—she is all nine perfect strangers undoing big little lies.
On the whole, the show is a moreish-ly watchable, nearly there drama. The material doesn’t feel quite good enough for the actors, but it’s certainly not beneath them. My main snag is the choreographed opening credits—Greer would never. And maybe it’s weird that the NDA-ed-up-to-the-eyeballs family members don’t once ask for a lawyer when being interviewed by the police. All the same, this show has all the hallmarks of a Fincher, but ladles so much froth onto the plot, and lingers so little on its emotional beats, that you end up relieved it’s not stressing you out like Gone Girl.