If the last decade of
television has taught me anything it’s that if you’re attending a fancy event
with a bunch of very wealthy people, drinking, dancing or celebrating and Nicole
Kidman shows up, leave as quickly as possible. Because by the end of the night,
the police are going to be there, somebody’s going to be dead and it sure as
hell won’t be Nicole Kidman.
I actually saw a variation
on this in a satirical piece on medium and it’s funny because it’s definitely true.
It doesn’t matter if your attending a fundraiser for trivia night (Big
Little Lies), an auction for your son’s prep school (The Undoing) or
a health and wellness retreat (Nine Perfect Strangers) if Nicole shows
up, some serious shit is going down and you’ll be lucky if you escape with your
life. It is for that reason that I chose not to watch The Perfect Couple when
it dropped on Netflix last fall despite Kidman’s presence and the all-star
talent.
Don’t get me wrong; I
loved all three series and I am a huge fan of Kidman’s work on TV everywhere. I’m
actually kind of amazed she has free time to do anything: last year she shot
this series, the second season of Lioness and Nine Perfect Strangers,
starred in Babygirl and is apparently working on the third season of
Big Little Lies which as of this writing is scheduled to premiere
something in 2025. But I had doubts about this project even before it debuted,
mainly because the source material comes from an Elin Hilderbrand novel rather
than a more high class one such as Lianne Moriarty. The cast is an incredible
selection of actors, of course: Liev Schrieber, Dakota Fanning, Megann Fahy,
Michael Beach are among the regulars and such peerless talent as Tim Bagley and
Isabelle Adjani are among the guest stars. But even someone who is as much a
fan of the talents knows that there’s only so many times you can go back to
this particular setup before the returns start to diminish. And considering
that there were a lot of others shows in the leadup to awards season that were priorities
(Day of the Jackal, Nobody Wants This) and returning series I actually
wanted to see (Season 2 of Shrinking, Agatha All Along) going through
another one of these kinds of fluffy works didn’t appeal to me. And honestly if Schreiber hadn’t been the
surprise winner of Best Supporting Actor in a Limited Series at the Critics
Choice on Friday (beating such favorites as Robert Downey Jr. and Treat
Williams) I wouldn’t have watched it at all. But as I never watch the Super
Bowl and I needed to kill some time I took a peak on Netflix. When I saw it was
only six episodes long and most of the episodes were not that long, I decided what
the hell.
If this doesn’t sound like
the most glowing of leadups, that’s really because it’s not. I’ve watched the
first two episode and I won’t deny there are good things about them and it is
very watchable. But as we all know there are a lot of demands on the viewers
time and for me the standards are much higher. It can’t just be watchable. It
has to be riveting. And that’s the thing about The Perfect Couple. There
are good things about it, but the problems they’re things that we’ve all seen
before – and the leads in the cast really don’t help us forget that.
We start out with the
image of the eve of a great wedding with all the footage of the happy guests
talking to each other. It’s in Nantucket, not LA or New York but as we all know
that’s the place where all the wealthy people from those places usually go to
vacation. We see the pictures of everybody being film from the camera, all
saying happy things for the bride and groom and we know without even having to
think that there all just lying to the camera. We see the parents of the groom
Greer and Tag (Kidman and Schreiber) both talking about how happy their years
of marriage have been; and we know that one or both of them is having an affair
right now, probably with one of the guests. (That part is proven true by the
start of the second episode.) It’s no surprise when we cut to the night and
there’s a scream.
Then the chief of police
is called at home (on a weekend no less!) and he tells his daughter that she’s
not going to have her catering job this weekend. Naturally we see her with
something blood-spattered. The chief is called to the beach and there’s someone
from out of state looking down on all the wealthy people here and has no patience
for the idea that this family has gambled all their privilege away. And sure
enough the guests are brought into the station one by one too comment about how
obscene rich the family is, how unpleasant they all are in public and how they
probably would kill somebody. And then we flashback to the previous day when
they all arrive. Honestly the only thing that’s different from Big Little
Lies is that the victim is revealed at the end of the first episode and it’s
a friend of the bride, Merrit (Fahy) Even that is a callback to the most recent
season of The White Lotus which as you might remember opened with Fahy
on the beach in Italy telling a new arrival what a great time they’d have
before the body washed up on sure.
That’s the other problem The
Perfect Couple can’t overcome: it’s clearly modeled as much on Mike White’s
anthology series as Big Little Lies. We’ve got a bunch of super-privileged
family (like we saw in Season 1) Greer is the major money earner in this family:
she’s a best selling author whose most famous novel is called, well, The
Perfect Couple. She has the balls of everyone in the family – and possibly
Nantucket in a vise. The only difference between her character and Connie
Britton’s is that it took a couple of episodes for Britton’s dark side to
emerge: we know from the start Greer’s an ice maiden and that she’s not really
capable of loving even her children.
It seems that Tag (Schreiber)
was the son of privilege and Tag acts like he’s trying to be a hard-ass corporate
type but he’s so old money he doesn’t know how to do it. We know twenty minutes
in he’s having an affair with someone and so does Greer. We’re just waiting to
find out who that person is – and in what should come as a shock to no one its
Merritt, who of course confessed this to Amelia before she died. And as we saw at
the end of the episode Greer knew this as well.
Now I’ll acknowledge that
there is some originality and humor in the first two episodes: there’s the way
the family passing around medication like party favors over the breakfast table
(they may not actually eat breakfast) the eldest son who is married (to Dakota
Fanning) is having an affair with his French tutor (Adjani) who also had an
affair with his father and there’s the way the entirely family acts as if it’s
an inconvenience to have the Nantucket Police around their homes after the death.
The family is annoyed that the cruiser is blocking the driveway and the
children have to explain that their donations to the Police funds don’t allow
them to interfere in the investigation – which they don’t seem to get. And Amelia
(Eve Hewson) is someone who doesn’t come from money and is clearly trying to
figure out if she actually loves Greer the night before the wedding. There is a
bit of integrity here that we never see on shows like The White Lotus. But
even that doesn’t change the fact that we’ve basically seen the kind of character
Abby played in Shailene Woodley’s Jane in Big Little Lies.
Honestly what does work in
Perfect Couple is Kidman and Schrieber. Of all the roles Kidman has
played on television over the last years she’s always playing someone who is
icy on the surface but messy underneath. Here Greer is someone who may be icy
all the way down. There doesn’t seem to be an ounce of humanity in her even
when it comes to the fact that she’s been cheated on by her husband; she’s
honestly more concerned about what that would look like for her image on Oprah.
There’s something sickly funny about watching Kidman embrace the bitchiness of
Greer in a way I haven’t seen her due in a long time.
Even better is Schreiber,
who is looser on television – really anything I’ve seen on him – then he’s been
in a long time. There’s something almost clueless in the way he talks to Amelia
about how her mother’s cancer is a great excuse for getting stoned, or how he
brings coffee to the police chief and seems to think that the beach house
counts more as his property than a crime scene. The way he and Greer drink
after a day and mock the people for the painting of their doors – just hours
after a dead body’s washed up on shore – is hysterical because you get the
feeling that this is just another inconvenience rather than a human life: one
who Tag was sleeping with, for that matter. It’s fun watching the two of them
and it nearly redeems the series.
That being said, I’m going
to make my rating of this show more conditional than usual and I’m reminded of
a line from Miss Jean Brodie: “For those who like this sort of thing,
this is the sort of thing they’ll like.” So if you’re a fan of Kidman’s work,
if the cast is enough of a draw, if you want to enjoy an exercise of style over
substance, then you will probably like The Perfect Couple. It won’t take
that long to watch the whole thing and it’s definitely a better use of your
time than hate watching the latest season of Emily In Paris. All of
these will be why I watch all six episodes. Maybe it’ll even get a few Emmy
nominations down the road to justify my time. That’s what I will base my
rating.
If however you want to see
shows that are actually more enjoyable, riveting and higher in quality on
Netflix I’d suggest seeing Ripley and Baby Reindeer if you haven’t
already or grit your teeth and do what I will eventually do and watch the
second season of Monsters. Then I’d wait for the second season of Nine
Perfect Strangers to drop on Hulu and watch that. Then watch the third
season of The White Lotus when it premieres next week or DVR it and
watch Season 3 of Yellowjackets (which is how I’ll do it.) Hell, maybe
wait for the third season of Big Little Lies to premier and see the real
thing. And remember if you see Nicole Kidman at your next social event, run.
My score: 3.25 stars (if
you really want to commit.)
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