Should anyone be mourning the unofficial “end” of summer, now that Labor Day weekend is in the rear view mirror, Netflix is doing us a solid. Its new series The Perfect Couple, starring Nicole Kidman and Liev Schreiber, is as much a TV version of a “beach read” as a series can be, allowing viewers to extend their escape to sunny mindlessness for just a bit longer. (For about as long as bingeing six twisty episodes will take.)
Aside from its decidedly summer aesthetic—a large portion of the action takes place at a pool at a massive, beachside Nantucket mansion—there’s a cozy familiarity to the thriller series. That is to say you’ll be watching and have the unshakable suspicion that you’ve seen this show before.
It’s both lazy and, still, completely apt to call The Perfect Couple a B-grade (or, let’s really be honest, C-grade) attempt to replicate the lightning in a bottle of The White Lotus or Big Little Lies. The White Lotus comparisons stem from the “wildly rich, impossibly attractive people behaving like total a--holes during a holiday” nature of the show. Because it stars Kidman and centers around a dark, mysterious tragedy, it’s tempting to call The Perfect Couple an east-coast version of Big Little Lies.
But given the fact that everything from the series’ casting to its soap opera nature is as if someone cut up the pages from those two series’ scripts, mixed them up, and then glued them together to make a new show, maybe the best comparison, again, given Kidman’s involvement, is HBO’s The Undoing. That’s a series that arrived with all the hype and promise of another juicy thriller, but which went off the rails with increasingly outlandish twists and characters whose behavior made absolutely no sense.
Nicole Kidman as Greer Winbury and Liev Schreiber as Tag Winbury
Seacia Pavao/NetflixThat’s the vibe The Perfect Couple is serving, but it’s so confident in that messiness that you can’t resist being swept up in it.
Kidman plays Greer Garrison Winbury, a hugely successful author—hence the jaw-dropping Nantucket estate—and Schreiber is her harried, pothead husband, Tag. It’s the big wedding weekend of their son, Benji (Billy Howle), to his beautiful bride-to-be Amelia (Eve Hewson), whose working-class status everyone in the family can barely hide their disgust over. That family includes s--t-stirring Thomas (Jack Reynor) and his pregnant, smugly mean-girl wife Abby (Dakota Fanning), and youngest son Will (Sam Nivola).
The wedding means a motley cast of characters is joining them on the island, including Amelia’s best friend and maid of honor Merritt (Meghann Fahy) and old family friend Shooter (Ishaan Khattar).
The lavish celebration, however, is interrupted by a shocking tragedy, which I won’t spoil because it is the big twist of the first episode and I don’t have the patience to be yelled at for ruining it. It’s also, however, the catalyst for the entire plot of the rest of the series, so there’s not much else I can write about the show without revealing it. But suffice it to say that the Big Thing That Happens opens a Pandora’s box of family secrets, and no one is too happy about that.
Dakota Fanning as Abby Winbury, Jack Reynor as Thomas Winbury, Eve Hewson as Amelia Sacks, Billy Howle as Benji Winbury, and Meghann Fahy as Merritt Monaco
Hilary Bronwyn Gayle/NetflixWatching The Perfect Couple is an interesting experience because the whole time, you can’t help thinking “this is trash.” But it’s intense trash, which, along with its cast full of stars way too good for this material, elevates the series to the point that you won’t feel embarrassed watching it.
Did I have fun watching it? I was routinely baffled by it. I was amused by the ludicrousness of some of the twists and the cast’s dogged attempts to sell them. It made me want to visit Nantucket, so now I’m somehow going to have to figure out how to afford that. And it had me wondering just how many Nicole Kidmans there are roaming this earth, or if she had obtained some sort of time travel machine that we’re not privy to. How is it possible to do as many projects per year as she does? And why, busy as she is, does she choose to star in a TV series as mediocre as this?
Nonetheless, The Perfect Couple is, like a beach read, a guarantee. The minute you press play on this series, you know what you’re going to get. And if you limit yourself to those expectations, it’s hard to imagine that you’ll have a bad time.
