Our appetite for disgustingly rich people behaving disgustingly never seems to wane. The Perfect Couple (Netflix), a big budget adaptation of Elin Hilderbrand’s novel, helps to explain why: it’s magisterial schlock. If you watched Succession not for the humour but for the turpitude, this will be right up your alley.
Even recounting the synopsis makes me feel dirty, but here goes: Amelia Sacks (Eve Hewson) is about to marry into one of the wealthiest families on Nantucket. Her furiously disapproving future mother-in-law, famous novelist Greer Garrison Winbury (Nicole Kidman), is the sort of woman who will invest a seven-figure budget on a wedding, and as such this one is set to be the event of the season – until a body turns up on the beach. Everyone in the family is a suspect. Even though no one in the family seems that bothered that someone has actually died on their property.
We could waste time analogising – it’s Big Little Lies on the East Coast; it’s The White Lotus via The Count of Monte Cristo but in Nantucket; it’s And Then There Were None but with private jets – but the writers of The Perfect Couple haven’t wasted any time covering their tracks.
Every cliché of the mega-bucks mystery thriller is here, from the title onwards. (Guess what – none of the couples actually are perfect, in fact they all hate each other!) The repellant rich people are offset with sensible, homely police (even if one of the police is beautifully played by Donna Lynne Champlin, channelling her best Mare of Easttown). The writers also haven’t troubled themselves too much with a nuanced plot or believable characters.
Instead, the family are all Cluedo cards with rote character traits, secrets are unearthed whenever a twist is required, and new bits of absolutely crucial information (“I’m pregnant!”) bubble up only when interest fades. There is a sizeable quotient of aggressive cringe throughout, too, beginning with the title sequence, which has the whole cast doing a naff dance routine on the beach. (You see? It’s all a performance!) Me? I loved it.
With Rian Johnson’s quasi-Agatha Christies currently riding high in cinema in the Knives Out franchise and a tongue-in-cheek adaptation of Jilly Cooper’s Rivals about to return to TV screens, what I am going to call airport-novel TV is bang on trend. Like a fancy-dress party, this kind of thing exists in a world beyond finesse.
The Perfect Couple is trash but it is top-notch trash, a show aiming only for sugar-hit moreishness and hitting the mark in almost every scene. Nantucket looks ludicrously beautiful; the family are ludicrously snobbish and unpleasant, and yet try as you might, you will want to know the who, what, where and why-dunit. As summer gives up trying and the nights close in, The Perfect Couple is the perfect winter warmer: a potboiler for the purists.
Disclaimer: The copyright of this article belongs to the original author. Reposting this article is solely for the purpose of information dissemination and does not constitute any investment advice. If there is any infringement, please contact us immediately. We will make corrections or deletions as necessary. Thank you.
