When was the last time Nicole Kidman played a poor person? A glance through the actress’s oeuvre reveals enough titled ladies, posh executives, and moneyed suburbanites to keep an army of financial advisers in Rolexes. One has to go back to the gay-conversion drama Boy Erased (2018) to find the Australian laboring among the plebs, and even there her hairdressing matriarch lived in a comfortable Arkansas two-story. Not since Cold Mountain (2003) has a Kidman character missed a meal, and not since Far and Away (1992) has one experienced real penury. I point this out not as a Marxist provocateur but as a critic interested in types. In Netflix ’s latest, Kidman is a novelist by the gold-plated name of Greer Garrison Winbury. Wouldn’t you know it, she owns a $40 million palace on the Nantucket coast .
That estate, donned Summerland by its inhabitants, is the setting of The Perfect Couple, a sprightly new limited series based on the novel by Elin Hilderbrand. Sprawling and luxuriously placed, Summerland is the kind of hideaway where the seafood and champagne arrive in “towers.” As the show opens, Greer is hosting a wedding of such extravagance that even the hors d’oeuvres look happy to be there. Yet not every WASP appurtenance is working for the team. When, at the end of the first episode, a body washes up on shore, police soon find an oyster shucker near the corpse. The solution, at least to this Southern boy, is plain enough. Massachusetts did it.
The Perfect Couple is not, despite every opportunity, an eat-the-rich satire. Yes, Greer is a tyrant — “Without fear, there can be no control,” a staff member remarks of our protagonist — but the show is so busy enjoying the trappings of wealth that it can’t be bothered to condemn them. Instead, Netflix’s production spends its energy tangling various motives and bedsheets: the jealous lover, in someone else’s room, with the barbiturate poisoning. Did Greer herself knock off the maid of honor (The White Lotus’s Meghann Fahy) despite or because of the victim’s coquettish charm? Or was that grim job done by someone else: a husband, perhaps, or one of Greer’s spoiled, insufferable children?
Like the best mystery dramas, the series offers no small helping of possible murderers. Played by a game Liev Schreiber, family patriarch Tag is a walking sexual harassment lawsuit who may or may not have seduced the victim. Firstborn son Thomas (Jack Reynor) is a louche pill-popper, while youngest Will (Sam Nivola) is so awkward he might have killed the poor girl in a fit of incel rage. Though middle son Benji (Billy Howle) and his bride-to-be, Amelia (Eve Hewson), seem normal enough, even the credulous viewer knows better than to trust them. The same is true of the peripheral characters: Thomas’s pregnant, lazy wife, Abby (Dakota Fanning); loyal housekeeper Gosia (Irina Dubova); and best man Shooter Dival (Ishaan Khatter). Not a one of them deserves the benefit of the investigatory doubt.
And so The Perfect Couple proceeds, spilling its secrets one episode at a time as a pair of cops (Donna Lynne Champlin and Michael Beach, both good) dig their way past the Winburys’ high-dollar façade. How did Amelia cut her foot, and why does she look so longingly out the window? Is Greer really so oblivious to her husband’s affairs? Why does the bride’s mother (Dendrie Taylor) have a secret stash of meds? Interspersing flashbacks, police interrogations, and the family’s post-murder intrigues, the series moves as nimbly as a windsurfer on the Nantucket Sound. If, as we are assured, the coin of the streaming realm is attention, The Perfect Couple may soon be as rich as its subjects. I spent all six episodes happily engaged, caught up in the problems of beautiful idiots and enthralled by the shimmering sea. If I want biting commentary, I’ll rewatch Succession. This time of year, mindless fun is more than enough.
Of course, appropriate casting helps as well. A hugely underrated talent, Schreiber has looked as if he were up to something at least since his turn as a wrongly convicted killer in the original Scream (1996). Kidman, meanwhile, has made a career of arch inscrutability. So mischievous is the actress’s gaze that one is tempted to search her pre-feature AMC commercials for hidden yearnings. Yet the real star of the production is Hewson, formerly of Netflix’s astral-projection psychodrama Behind Her Eyes (2021). Ridiculously voluptuous and doe-eyed, the young starlet (and Bono daughter) turns her supporting role into something approaching a lead through sheer charisma alone. One imagines the show’s writers expanding her scenes on the fly. “Whatever we do, we’ve got to get that woman back on screen.”
To be sure, The Perfect Couple is calorie-free entertainment, as sparkly and unfilling as an ice-cold Perrier. It is, nevertheless, the perfect end-of-summer treat: a boozy, breezy, soapy look at the rich and infamous. Taking it even halfway seriously would shatter the production into a thousand pieces. But who would ever think of doing that?
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Graham Hillard is editor at the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal and a Washington Examiner magazine contributing writer.
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