TV Review: "Nine Perfect Strangers (Season 2, Episodes 1-4)
The bonkers Hulu series returns for an entertaining, if not particularly illuminating, second season.
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Warning: Spoilers for the series follow.
At first, I will admit that I was a little confused as to why there was going to be a second season of the bonkers Hulu series Nine Perfect Strangers. After all, the first season hadn’t ended with a cliffhanger or anything, so it didn’t make a great deal of sense for the story to continue. However, once it was revealed that it would star such heavy hitters as Christine Baranski, Annie Murphy, Murray Bartlett and numerous others, I said to myself, “Well, what’s the worst that could happen? After all, far be it from me to look a gift horse like this in the mouth.”
Now that we’re four episodes deep into the second season, it’s clear that Nine Perfect Strangers has lost none of its daffiness nor, for that matter, has its main character, Nicole Kidman’s Masha Dmitrichenko. Having come under a lot of scrutiny and legal trouble due to her actions in the previous season, she is back at it, this time in the Alps, where she has once again gathered a group of people in desperate need of therapy. And, just as she did in the first season, Masha plays a game of manipulation and dosing, this time with mushrooms (seriously, though. We seem to be living in an age of mushroom fictions. It’s both very strange and very fascinating).
If anything, things only get crazier from there. There are, of course, the many moments when this group of damaged misfits engage in the sort of deranged behavior that one would expect of people being microdosed with hallucinogenic shrooms, including one particularly hilarious and grotesque sequence in which Henry Golding’s Peter Sharpe and Annie Murphy’s Imogen O’Clair hallucinate that they are part of the Alps-set story Heidi. Far more disturbing is the moment when Dolly de Leon’s Sister Agnes, a nun seeking absolution for her role in letting a young pregnant woman die, beats her head against a confessional stall while begging for a priest to forgive her. It’s haunting stuff, let me tell you, and it’s at these moments that the series really grips you.
Now, to be sure, this season does have its fair share of narrative bumps. While it can be a lot of fun to spend time with these deeply dysfunctional people, I have to admit that Kidman’s schtick as the enigmatic Masha is starting to wear a bit thin. It certainly doesn’t help matters that she largely takes a back seat during most of the episodes, content to just loom in the background or on a balcony while the poor schmucks she’s lured here are fated to dance like so many puppets on strings. I love Kidman as much as always, but I find her Russian accent increasingly difficult to credit. I likewise wish that would give her more to do. It doesn’t help that she still seems to be grappling with the shade of her daughter, despite the fact that this was a plot point that was supposedly resolved in the first season.
That being said, there are some truly terrific performances. Annie Murphy continues to astound with her versatility and range, plunging new depths as a daughter craving her mother’s love and affection, even as she can’t seem to hide her vicious ambivalence, particularly once her mommy dearest shows up with her newest young boy toy. That mother, played by none other than Christine Baranski, is a man-hungry socialite who seems as befuddled by her daughter’s resentment as she is to satisfying her libido with her much-younger lover. Watching these two spar with one another remains one of the highlights of the season, bringing some much-needed emotional authenticity to a show that can sometimes veer way too much into camp.
Murray Bartlett, meanwhile, continues to lean into his daddy persona, and he is a perfect fit for disgraced children’s show host Brian Tumkin. His character is undoubtedly an asshole, but one also gets the sense that there is a lot of hurt lurking beneath that furious exterior. After all, this is a man who devoted his life to helping children work through complicated and confusing emotions, only for it to come crashing down thanks to one notable outburst on-stage (which, of course, went viral on social media). Like the others, he has a lot of baggage to unpack, and the fact that he talks to a stuffed bear puppet says everything you need to know about him and about this seasons’ approach to its material.
Each episode typically unfolds in the same way. While the action in the present focuses on the various drug-induced treatments that Masha and her new batch of acolytes utilize, a series of flashbacks reveals key details about the various characters and the circumstances that brought them to this isolated chalet in the Alps. This pattern does get a bit old, but at the very least gives us some useful insight into these weirdos and why they act the way they do. As other critics have noted, though, it’s sometimes hard to really feel sorry for these people (with the possible exception of Sister Agnes). Even the resident queer couple, Tina and Wolfie–played by King Princess and Maisie Richardson-Sellers, respectively–come across as being more self-centered than genuinely interesting.
So far, anyway, Nine Perfect Strangers remains what it was in the first season. Diverting and bonkers but pleasing. I’m not sure that it has anything really significant to say about grief or remorse or the struggles that people go through as they try to reckon with their pasts. This is the kind of show that you can’t help watching, even as you also can’t help but wonder just what sort of new insanity is going to pop out of the woodwork next.
As is probably clear by now, I’m going to keep tuning in to this show, if for no other reason than that I love seeing the whole thing go off the rails in the most delicious fashion imaginable. Sometimes you just want to lose yourself in the world of the bonkers and the wealthy, and in that respect Nine Perfect Strangers more than delivers.