On the pristine white sand beaches of Nantucket, the wedding of the year is about to take place. Amelia Sacks (Eve Hewson) is preparing to marry Benji Winbury (Billy Howle), the son of the glamorous and wealthy Winbury family, headed by the icy matriarch Greer (Nicole Kidman). A famous novelist with plenty of money, she doesn’t approve of her son’s fiancé. But before the festivities can begin, a body is discovered on the beach. With a wedding party full of people with their own secrets, it falls to Nantucket’s police chief Dan Carter (Michael Beach) to investigate.
It’s surprising that it’s taken this long for someone to turn an Elin Hilderbrand novel into a binge-watchable television series. Known as “the queen of beach reads,” Hilderbrand’s Nantucket-set stories are full of sex, scandal, rich people’s problems, and interior design porn that would put Nancy Meyers to shame. “The Perfect Couple” has all that and a murder, sitting just right between “Big Little Lies” and “The White Lotus.” The end result is a series that’s great to watch and seems poised to dominate social media.
Long considered one of the finest actresses of her generation, Nicole Kidman is known for her risk-taking on screen. On television, however, she has created her own genre and stayed true to it with each new glossy miniseries: the privileged woman in domestic distress. The formula is solid: a female-centered drama, usually set in a picturesque location, where the upper-middle classes hide their personal dramas behind a veneer of luxury. If there’s a murder, all the better. These shows – think “Big Little Lies,” “Nine Perfect Strangers,” “The Undoing” and, to a lesser extent, “Expats” – are cheesy but serious, tempering their sillier storylines with palpable emotional stakes and a commitment to the oft-ignored stories of middle-aged women.
It’s a recipe for success, as the Emmy on her shelf attests. The biggest surprise, really, is that it took Kidman so long to acquire the rights to a Hilderbrand novel, her platonic ideal of a novel to be adapted for television.
And she’s definitely in her element here, with her perfectly coiffed blonde hair and the single-minded drive of a seasoned upstart. It’s the kind of role she could play in her sleep, but Kidman never lets herself slum it. It helps that she’s backed up by one of the season’s most enviable casts: Liev Schreiber as the charming but whoring husband Tag; Jack Reynor as Thomas, the slick, messed-up son and crypto brother (because of course we have at least one of those on this show); Dakota Fanning as the sister-in-law who enjoys the drama a little too much; and the legendary Isabelle Adjani as the family friend who gets most of the best lines. Special thanks to Eve Hewson, whose own TV resume has become impressive over the years with shows like “The Knick” and “Bad Sisters,” for her role as a serious black sheep of society trying to maintain her true self in the face of societal ostracism. Almost everyone is hot, rich and dramatic.
Many of the dynamics will be familiar to fans of Kidman’s television works: the class anxieties of American society, the disintegration of the image of the “perfect family,” and the way both have a greater impact on women. Amelia, the bride-to-be, is a brilliant career woman with a loving family, but in Greer’s eyes, that’s clearly not enough for the Winbury name. They can barely contain their disdain when Amelia’s mother, dying of cancer, brings them a less-than-lavish fruit basket. Even the maid seems angry with Amelia for washing her own dishes. It’s all part of a vicious cycle Greer experienced when she married into the family (her boasting that she read Tom Wolfe to prepare for meeting her in-laws is one of the funnier details of this ridiculous issue).
The sheer work of class takes the fun out of the rich people’s antics for people like Amelia, though the camera (by Oscar-winning director Susanne Bier, who worked with Kidman on “The Undoing”) still likes to linger on the prime real estate and champagne towers of Nantucket. This genre is about having it all, after all, but it also offers a number of fun Easter eggs for Hilderbrand devotees who have waited years to see the oft-described settings of their favorite books.
A genre like this needs a good murder to keep it going for six episodes, and “The Perfect Couple” has an entertaining crime thriller at its core. As the series progresses, it seems like a lot of people have a motive for committing this particular crime. There are affairs, money problems, and everyone’s desperate need to maintain the shattered status quo. The interrogations led by local police chief Dan Carter (Beach plays one of the regular characters in Hilderbrand’s novels) show that the various people present may be enjoying the mystery as much as the audience. It’s all slickly presented, not unlike “Big Little Lies,” told earnestly but with enough soap opera to keep it from descending into utter bleakness. As in “The White Lotus,” which feels like another obvious inspiration, murder is the Trojan horse that draws us into the lives of the living, and there are plenty of charming but easily despised characters here. You can’t like the rich people too much. It takes all the fun out of it.
The season may be over, but The Perfect Couple still feels like the ideal summer series, the platonic ideal of the subgenre that has become Kidman’s TV standard. It comes nowhere near the heights of Big Little Lies’ first season and is sure to generate a similar level of enthusiasm among viewers. Kidman’s reign over the domestic peril miniseries continues for another year.
“The Perfect Couple” premieres on Netflix on Thursday, September 5.
The post ‘The Perfect Pair’ Review: Nicole Kidman Continues Her Must-See Murder Series Streak on Netflix appeared first on TheWrap.
