On the impeccably white sandy beaches of Nantucket, the wedding of the year is about to happen. Amelia Sacks (Eve Hewson) is preparing to marry Benji Winbury (Billy Howle), the son of the glamorous and monied Winbury family, headed by icy matriarch Greer (Nicole Kidman.) A famous novelist with cash to spare, she doesn’t approve of her son’s fiance. But before the festivities can begin, a body is discovered on the beach. In a wedding party full of people with their own secrets, it falls upon Nantucket’s chief of police, Dan Carter (Michael Beach), to investigate.
It’s surprising that it’s taken this long for someone to adapt an Elin Hilderbrand novel into a binge-ready TV series. Known as “the Queen of the beach reads,” Hilderbrand’s Nantucket-set sagas are loaded with sex, scandals, rich people problems and interior decor porn that would put Nancy Meyers to shame. “The Perfect Couple” has all this and a murder, putting it right in that sweet spot between “Big Little Lies” and “The White Lotus.” The end result is a highly bingeable show that seems primed for social media domination.
Nicole Kidman, long considered one of the best actresses of her generation, is known for her risk-taking on the big screen. In TV, however, she’s created her own genre and stayed in that lane with every new glossy miniseries: The privileged woman in domestic peril. The formula is solid: a female-centered drama, usually in a picturesque locale, where the upper-middle classes conceal their personal dramas behind a sheen of aspirational luxury. If there’s a murder then all the better. These shows — think “Big Little Lies,” “Nine Perfect Strangers”, “The Undoing” and to a lesser extent “Expats” — are soapy but earnest, tempering their more ludicrous plot beats with palpable emotional stakes and a commitment to the oft-ignored narratives of middle-aged women.
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It’s a winning formula, as the Emmy on her shelf proves. Really, the biggest surprise is that it took Kidman this long to option a Hilderbrand novel, her platonic ideal of a novel to adapt for TV.
And she’s certainly in her element here, with blonde hair coiffed to the gods and the laser-minded drive of a seasoned social climber. It’s the kind of role she could play in her sleep but Kidman never slums it. It helps when she’s ably supported by one of the season’s most enviable casts: Liev Schreiber as the charming but philandering husband Tag; Jack Reynor as Thomas, the smarmy screw-up son and crypto bro (because of course we have at least one of those in this show); Dakota Fanning as the sister-in-law who enjoys the drama bit too much; and the legendary Isabelle Adjani as a family friend who gets most of the best lines. A special shout-out goes to Eve Hewson, whose own TV resume has grown impressive over the years with shows like “The Knick” and “Bad Sisters,” for playing the earnest black sheep of the gathering who tries to maintain her true self in the face of social ostracizing. Almost everyone is hot, rich and dramatic.
A lot of the dynamics here will feel familiar to fans of the Kidman TV oeuvre: the anxieties of class in American society; the fracturing of the “perfect family” image; and the ways that both more heavily impact women. Amelia, the bride-to-be, is a brilliant career woman with a loving family, but it’s clearly not enough for the Winbury name in Greer’s eyes. They can barely hide their disdain when Amelia’s mother, who is dying of cancer, brings them an inadequately fancy fruit basket. Even the maid seems mad at Amelia for the crime of doing her own dishes. It’s all part of a vicious cycle, one that Greer suffered through when she married into the family (her bragging that she read Tom Wolfe in preparation to meet her in-laws is one of the funnier details of this ludicrous problem.)
The sheer labor of class saps the fun out of the rich people antics for the likes of Amelia, although the camera (held by Oscar-winning director Susanne Bier, who worked with Kidman on “The Undoing”) is still keen to linger on the prime Nantucket real estate and champagne towers. It’s all about having your cake and eating it in this genre, after all, but it also provides a number of fun easter eggs for Hilderbrand devotees who have waited years to see the oft-written about settings of their favorite books.
A genre like this needs a good murder to maintain its momentum for six episodes, and “The Perfect Couple” has a fun whodunnit at its core. As the series goes on, it certainly seems as though a lot of people have the motive for commiting this particular crime. There are affairs, money problems and the desperate need for everyone to maintain the fractured status quo. The interrogations, headed by local chief of police Dan Carter (Beach, playing one of the regular characters in Hilderbrand’s novels), reveal that the various attendees might be enjoying the mystery as much as the audience. It’s all slickly presented, not unlike “Big Little Lies”, seriously told but with enough soapiness to stop it from descending into total bleakness. Like “The White Lotus”, which feels like another obvious inspiration, the murder is the Trojan horse to get us into the lives of the living, and there are plenty of charming but easy-to-root-against figures here. You can’t like the rich people too much. It sucks out all the fun.
The season might be at an end, but “The Perfect Couple” still feels like the ideal Summer binge-watch, the platonic ideal of the subgenre that has become the Kidman prestige TV standard. It’s easily the closest she’s come to the heights of that first season of “Big Little Lies” and it’s sure to inspire a similar level of enthusiasm among viewers. Kidman’s reign over the domestic peril miniseries continues for another year.
“The Perfect Couple” premieres Thursday, Sept. 5, on Netflix.
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