Big Little Lies, Nine Perfect Strangers, Top of the Lake: China Girl, The Undoing... if there’s a melodramatic show with an excellent wardrobe and questionable wigs, it’s likely Nicole Kidman is there. She’s charmed critics with her newest movie, Babygirl, but on the streaming side, she’s established a habit of creating beach-read TV.
Her latest endeavor isn’t just another fluffy book adaptation but the final boss of the micro-genre, a story that subverts its own self-seriousness to the point where it feels unsettlingly carefree and joyful. It’s more than just a show your mom will say she loved; it’s full-blown experimental art.
Netflix’s The Perfect Couple, based on the book by the Queen of Beach Reads, Elin Hilderbrand, begins with the perfect setting for an upper-class murder mystery. A wealthy family gathers on the island of Nantucket to see their son married to a lower-class outsider, but the class difference is evident at every moment. Also evident is the fact that not everyone is making it out of the rehearsal dinner alive; the groom keeps saying, “I love this woman to DEATH, you hear me? To DEATH!” while a guest describes the family as “kill-someone-and-get-away-with-it rich.”
At the head of the family is the excellently named Greer Garrison Winbury (Kidman), who supports the clan through her countless books about Dash and Dolly, a “perfect couple” presumedly based on her and her husband, Tag (Liev Schreiber). The wedding of their son Benji (Billy Howle) to Amelia (Eve Hewson) should be just as perfect, but it all goes awry when the body of Amelia’s maid of honor, Merritt (Meghann Fahy), is found washed up on the beach the morning of the ceremony.
The show rarely loses sight of how grim the subject matter is — Amelia mopes around smelling Merritt’s old sweaters and curling up in bed with her parents, while Nikki Henry (Donna Lynne Champlin), the World’s Most Bostonian Detective, interrogates each wedding guest, from the tearful pregnant sister-in-law (Dakota Fanning) to the exotic and mysterious family friend (Isabelle Adjani). But when the show does forget its own stakes, it goes all out.
Every episode begins with a choreographed dance sequence set to Meghan Trainor’s “Criminals,” featuring the full cast dancing at the rehearsal dinner, where everyone seems both in and out of character. “I feel this time [period] is a little bit gloomy and I felt I wanted to do something which had a lot of life and a lot of fun,” director Susanne Bier told Variety. “I wanted to see all the characters having fun.”
It’s a baffling choice to both the audience and, apparently, the cast, who vented about how strange the choice was. “The entire cast had a mutiny about this idea except for me, I was already in my trailer practicing the dance moves,” Liev Schreiber told Variety. “I was kinda disappointed when it came out that I’m not in it more because I thought I did it really well.”
It’s not the only strange moment, as Schreiber’s Tag seems to only have two personality traits: being hot and being prone to bursting into song. At his wife’s book launch, a climactic moment in the mystery, he declares his love by bursting into Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up” and awkwardly forcing everyone to sing along.
The Perfect Couple is trying to replicate the breezy experience of reading a trashy novel on the beach, but reading a murder story and watching a murder story are two very different vibes. Usually, thriller shows have to be ultra-serious to be a fun watch, but by putting the absurdity front and center, the viewer is confronted by their own voyeuristic joy of watching rich people be miserable.
Beneath the tonal whiplash and musical numbers is a series that uncovers secrets and reveals a story so unabashedly ridiculous that it’s both an indictment of the crime thriller and the perfect example of one. By the time you reach the last episode, when the director joins the dance party, you won’t care about the plot holes and baffling atmosphere. You’ll just be having fun, murder and all.
