The Perfect Couple

Apparently this is just what Nicole Kidman does now. She and her frozen face play the WASPy, American wife in pulpy television shows based on garbage-y summer beach read novels exclusively about abused and/or murdered women. And, look, I suppose she has a bit of an industry going. Nicole Kidman: soapy television star. I suppose it beats being married to Tom Cruise. Though, honestly, I’m beginning to tire of these “rich families have problems too!” stories. We’ve seen the Kennedys. We know everything is not always peachy, and they have affairs and addiction and occasionally drive a nice lady off a bridge and leave her to drown. Which is pretty much what goes on in The Perfect Couple. Though the nice lady drowns not in a car and not off Chappaquiddick, but off the property of an old-money family’s estate just across the sound in Nantucket. Same same.

As if you couldn’t guess, the “perfect” in The Perfect Couple is not meant to be sincere. I think the idea is that to everyone outside the family, our couple appears to be perfect. But they are, in fact, anything but. Although anyone with eyes who hangs out with these weirdos for more than thirty seconds can tell that the husband, Tag Winbury (Liev Schreiber), is a drunken stoner layabout. And the wife, Greer (Kidman), is one tick away from a full-blown meltdown. Sure, she’s a famous novelist (because, as usual, writers love writing about writers), but it seems more like she’s an indentured servant, chained to a desk and forced to crank out books to support her ne’er do well, idiot family. In other words, they’re a mess. Barely even able to fake this perfection that I think the show thinks the outside world sees. Nah, their messiness is obvious and ongoing.

If you’ve ever seen Succession, you’ll know the set up. Put the battle-worn family all in one place for an occasion. Kind of lock them in there so everyone has to deal with one another and there’s no real escape other than a ferry or a helicopter. And these people, while rich, aren’t helicopter rich. In this case, we have a wedding between the Winbury’s son, Benji (Billy Howle), and commoner, Amelia (Eve Hewson), all to take place on the Winbury’s seaside estate. Benji is a somewhat boring, uptight, but sincere, guy with a really fake American accent. Amelia is a normal girl who is, in reality, the daughter of the incredibly wealthy rockstar and philanthropist, Bono. Her fake American accent is much better than both Billy Howle’s and the guy who plays Billy older brother, Jack Reynor. I suppose the show’s creators felt it was fine to have a mishmash of bizarro accents in this Winbury family and not even attempt the Massachusetts thing because their own mom, Nicole Kidman, has her own Aussie dialect that slips out on occasion in unfortunate ways. Whatever, these are my usual complaints that even I’m sick of. But, as usual, they throw all these people together — these mostly terrible people — someone ends up dead and then people have to mill around waiting for the cops to figure out whodunnit. Oh, the murdered woman — because it’s always a woman — is Amelia’s best friend and maid of honor, Merritt Monaco (Meghann Fahy). And, yes, the character’s name is Merritt Monaco. Why? I don’t know.

Anyhow, we get to watch as each member of the extended Winbury family’s motivations for murdering poor Merritt Monaco are laid bare. This one was jealous of her. That one may or may not have been having an affair with her. This one probably, most definitely, spent a lot of time alone in his room thinking about her with a box of tissues. That one is an incredibly weird 70-year-old plastic-surgeried French woman who is seemingly sleeping with everyone, maybe? They all have their reasons, though most of them are pretty weak. Save the aforementioned dummy, Tag. He’s a cad, that man. And, of course, his tightly-wound wife, who’s face doesn’t give anything away — how could it with it being one shade of serene — but is definitely aware of her truly idiotic husband’s foibles and probably has some boiling rage that she’s the only one in the whole family pulling her weight. And, of course, there’s your local cop who is well aware of the family’s standing in the community and their donations to the police union, but there’s also the outside tough lady cop who doesn’t care and is full of fun quips. They sniff around. The people plot and we get our usual series of perspective flashbacks and side dalliances. It’s a good thing this series was only six episodes long, because almost nothing happens. Two more episodes and they would have Möbius stripped themselves out of existence. People talk in rooms. People talk on the beach. There is the occasional entertainment and even the occasional chuckle at the doofiness of Reynor’s and Schrieber’s characters. But mostly I stopped to look how much time was left in the episode to see when we might get any closer to knowing who the murderer was. And, honestly, by episode six I hardly cared anymore. So when they revealed the culprit, I looked at Ms. Hipster and we both shrugged. Because it felt like that’s what the show deserved. And what it kind of expected from its audience. In the old days, this would have been a 90-minute indie film. Not everything has to be a TV series.