Nicole Kidman and Liev Schreiber lead a spoiled family in a silly crime miniseries.
Plot: Amelia Sacks is about to marry into one of the wealthiest families on Nantucket. Her disapproving future mother-in-law, famous novelist Greer Garrison Winbury, has spared no expense in planning what will be the most important wedding of the season – until a body turns up on the beach. As secrets come to light, the stage is set for a real investigation that feels like it came straight from the pages of one of Greer’s novels. Suddenly everyone is a suspect.
review: There are so many top series out there these days that it can be unbearable trying to decide what to watch. From high-profile, acclaimed projects that win countless awards and raise the bar for what long-form storytelling can achieve to big-budget spectacles that rival the biggest summer blockbusters, there’s something for every taste. But while there’s a time and a place for an elegant meal of fine dining, sometimes you want a greasy cheeseburger. It’s satisfying and instant, but it doesn’t provide any benefit in the long run. That’s exactly what The perfect couple The latest in the series of soap opera drama series in which Nicole Kidman has starred over the past decade, The perfect couple is a mixture of mystery crime and wealth porn, which is the core of series like Yellowstone And Consequence. A surprisingly funny miniseries with a very complex series of twists, The perfect couple is too ridiculous for his own good.
Located on Nantucket’s extremely wealthy beachfront, The perfect couple revolves around the wedding of Amelia Sacks (Eve Hewson) and Benji Winbury (Billy Howle), the middle child of bestselling author Greer Garrison Winbury (Nicole Kidman) and her wealthy husband of generations, Tag (Liev Schreiber). Coming from a middle-class family, Amelia is unaccustomed to the life of the one percent Winbury clan, which includes her eldest son Thomas (Jack Reynor) and youngest Will (Sam Nivola). While preparations for Amelia and Benji’s wedding are underway, a murder brings the entire clan under suspicion, including Thomas’ wife Abby (Dakota Fanning), Benji’s best friend Shooter Dival (Ishaan Khattar), Amelia’s best friend and famous influencer Merritt Monaco (Meghann Fahy), family friend Isabel (Isabelle Adjani), and even the police chief’s daughter Chloe (Mia Isaac). As Chief Carter (Michael Beach) and Detective Nikki Henry (Donna Lynne Champlin) investigate the murder, secrets and lies come to light involving every member of the family and their inner circle.
Over the course of six episodes, the police investigation brings to light so many things that most series would have needed twice as many episodes to deal with. The perfect couple crams them into half a dozen chapters, you rarely get through an episode without changing the list of suspects several times. There are extramarital affairs, drugs, hush money, drugs, alcohol, cheating, drugs and the occasional social media meltdown to tie the family members together, figuratively and literally. Where a series like Consequence the verbal insults between the characters were exploited for satirical purposes, The perfect couple seems unsure if it wants to mock the protagonists. Liev Schreiber plays Tag as a perpetually stoned patriarch who fails to recognize the gravity of what is happening around him and goes from being a prominent character to almost a parody of himself by the end of the series. Jack Reynor and Dakota Fanning are very good at playing spoiled brats, while Meghann Fahy does a solid job in a role that reflects her turn The white lotus. Isabelle Adjani doesn’t overdo it in a supporting role and will hopefully encourage many to take a look at her illustrious filmography, which shows how much great work she has done.
The biggest roles in this series are played by Eve Hewson and Nicole Kidman. Kidman seems to spend more time working on series like this than ever before, with The perfect couple fits right next to it Big little lies And Nine perfect strangers as another role as a wealthy mother and wife whose life is turned upside down by a death. Kidman is good here, as she usually is, but this may be the most superficial of her leading roles on the small screen in recent years. It’s entertaining to see her play with the actors portraying her family, especially when she’s opposite Eve Hewson. Hewson, who had her breakthrough role in The Knick, Bad Sisters, and last year Flora and son, is one of the few characters in this series not born into wealth, and sees the corrupt core she is willing to marry into. Kidman and Hewson have two of the least funny roles in the series, which contains so many jokes that I wondered if this was a drama meant to be funny, or a part dramatic comedy. It’s handled so unevenly that it undermines the tone of the entire series.
Based on the book by bestselling author Elin Hildebrand, The perfect couple was the author’s first crime novel after a successful career as a novelist. Created by Resident Alien Actress Jenna Lamia, who wrote or co-wrote all six episodes, The perfect couple has a good dose of humor that seems to contradict the dark subject matter. The entire series was directed by Susanne Bier, who did a phenomenal job with the film. Birdhouse and the drama series The night manager. Bier works again with Nicole Kidman, which she directed The fate, another story of a family torn apart by a heinous crime. While Bier’s previous work focused on the characters and suspense of the traffic crime, she seems to have lost the humor a little in this adaptation. One direction would have been to play this subject as a pitch-black comedy, but everything is so light and fluffy that it never feels like it’s about anything serious. The massive Bollywood-esque dance number that serves as the opening credits of the series is the perfect statement of how contrived and fake this story is.
There are many moments in this series, especially throughout the final episode, where I found myself laughing at the characters’ jokes. I wasn’t laughing because they were particularly funny, but because they seemed so out of place compared to the subject matter. In every sequence in this series, there are scenes where half the actors are playing them as comedians and the others are playing them as serious characters, almost as if they were in two different shows. The limited six-episode run also means that many of the elements introduced over the course of the series serve little to no purpose by the end of the show. The perfect couple is disappointing and disappointing, even though it looks like everyone involved had a lot of fun making it. It certainly won’t be as much fun to watch.
The perfect couple Premiere on September 5th on Netflix.
