Better Late Than Never: The Perfect Couple
Nicole Kidman & Liev Schreiber Are Great In A Very Familar Story
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 wealth 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.)