TV Review: "The Perfect Couple"

Netflix's Nicole Kidman-led mystery drama (or black comedy?) is entertaining enough but ultimately frustrating and forgettable.

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Spoilers ahead!

I went into The Perfect Couple, the newest highly-polished with rather low expectations. I think we can agree that Netflix is quite adept at producing series that look great and feature strong acting but are notably lacking in the story department. I’ve lost count of the number of shows I’ve watched on this streamer that simply vanish into the ether, mostly because there’s nothing about them to really provide any ballast or staying power. This is most unfortunate, particularly since Netflix has also grown very adept at canceling shows that actually seem to have some substance and that develop a strong (but undoubtedly small) following, while also continuing to pump out content that is as forgettable as it is bingeable. 

But, given that this series stars the divine Nicole Kidman, of whom I remain a steadfast fan, I figured it was worth a watch. And for most of its six-episode run I was entertained, if not absolutely enraptured. I mean, who doesn’t love a series in which a bunch of rich people are shown to be shallow and horrible and rotten from the inside out? Well, as it turns out, I didn’t particularly love this one, precisely because it comes to feel so much like other shows of a similar type–including, as other reviewers have noted, Big Little Lies–even as it has some clashing tones that make for a discordant viewing experience. 

It certainly doesn’t help that its story is both unfocused and underwhelming. At first it seems as if Eve Hewson’s Amelia is going to be the main character, since she’s the one that’s getting married to the well-meaning Benjy (Billy Howle), only to find herself repeatedly falling afoul of his intimidating mother, Greer Garrison Winbury, a wildly successful author who is married to Liev Schreiber’s alcoholic weed addict Tag (who also happens to be the inspiration for one of heroes in her novels). Things go rapidly awry when Amelia’s best friend and maid of honor, Merritt (Meghann Fahy, of White Lotus fame) is found dead in the water, and much of the rest of the season is devoted to detectives’ attempts to figure out who did it, along with the excavating of the family’s more sinister secrets.

Even though Amelia is supposedly the main character and our major source of identification, she becomes more and more incidental to the plot as the series goes on. By the time that we get to the finale, she’s become almost a secondary character in her own story. I couldn’t even find it in myself to care about her pseudo-romance with family friend Shooter (a beautiful and doe-eyed Ishaan Khatter) let alone with her fiance Benjy. The same goes for most of the other main characters and even the various secrets that get revealed, none of which feel particularly significant or impactful, despite the series’ attempt to make us think that they are.

If there’s one redeeming thing to this show, it’s the performances. Kidman is of course sublime, managing to be both cold and steely and yet oddly vulnerable as the matriarch of this icy WASP family. We get the sense from the beginning that there’s far more to her than the hostile mother-in-law persona that she presents to the world and, indeed, it comes to pass that she has a few skeletons in her closet. This is the kind of role Kidman could play in her sleep, but such is her star power and her commitment that she manages to imbue Greer with a dynamism most of the others lack.

The other standout is Dakota Fanning, who once again shows that playing stone-cold bitches is really her comfort zone as an adult actress. From the moment we meet her it’s clear that, as with Greer, there’s a lot more going on behind her placid exterior than she is willing to let on, and she’s really quite adept at delivering a withering line. And, for all that she is pregnant, she clearly resents her husband and his family. She’s the type of character that you love to hate, and I give Fanning a lot of credit for making her someone that’s so much more interesting than our supposed lead.

The secondary characters are, if anything, even more fascinating than the principals. Isabelle Adjani is captivating as the French siren Isabel Nallet, who has been carrying on an affair with Beny’s brother Tom (played by Jack Reynor, who is largely reprising his performance from Midsommar). For me, though, the true highlight is Donna Lynne Champlin, who plays Nikki Henry, who’s sent in by the state to help solve the crime. Her accent may be a bit scattershot, but she brings the same wry sense of detachment that she did to her performance as Paula in Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. You can well believe that this is the type of woman more than willing to alienate the wealthy if it means getting to the bottom of a murder. If I have one complaint about the secondary cast, it’s that they waste the bitchy comedic talents of Tim Bagey, who never met a gay guest role he couldn’t sink his teeth into.

If only these performances were matched by a consistency in either tone or narrative coherence. Instead, they’re all mired in a show that can never quite decide what it wants to be, whether it wants to take the mocking-the-rich approach of a show like The White Lotus or the adopt sensationalistic bite of a true crime docudrama. The actual mystery of who murdered Merritt starts to feel like an afterthought, and even the revelation of who actually did it is delivered so anticlimactically that one can’t help but wonder whether we’re supposed to take it seriously or not. 

Ultimately, the whole show comes to feel like so many other Netflix productions these days. That is to say, it’s entertaining enough, and you won’t be bored but, at the end of the day, you’ll emerge from the series struggling to see the point of it all. To be quite honest, I’m not even sure why it’s called The Perfect Couple, because the relationship between Greer and Tag is so thinly-drawn (and so clearly antagonistic) that it’s a struggle for us as viewers to figure out just why it is that so many of their fans remain enraptured by them. 

This might make for a couple of afternoons’ worth of diversion, but I doubt anyone will remember it this time next year.