The Perfect Couple opens with a formation of beaming household names performing a choreographed routine to the type of track you’d passively hear on Selling Sunset over a shot of an infinity pool. Judging from this title sequence, the series’ sick-in your-mouth title and its reception on Rotten Tomatoes, The Perfect Couple seems destined to plummet into the archive of lacklustre Netflix cash-grabbers aimed at a young female audience – that is, if it weren’t already aware of that itself.
Adapted from the 2018 book by Elin Hilderbrand, the premise is familiar: girl-next door type Amelia (Eve Hewson) arrives in Nantucket to marry Benji (Billy Howles) at his multimillionaire parents’ home (Nicole Kidman and Liev Schreiber). On the morning of their wedding, an important guest is found dead.
If Big Little Lies and White Lotus are the designer-brands of shows about murdered elites, The Perfect Couple is admittedly more of a Zara. The limited series dashes through expected themes like class, sexuality and masculinity at a speed which almost assumes we’ve seen this all before. Viewers expecting a nuanced study of “profounder” themes will be let down, but not unintentionally. It’s not that this series tries to dig deeper and fails – on the contrary, it’s not remotely ashamed of its artificiality. In a way, that ridiculous title sequence is telling us: we know what you’re really here for – scandal, sex and good-looking people in an aspirational (but easily satirised) sect of society. The casting directors are in on it, too: White Lotus’ Meghann Fahy features as Merritt Monaco in a particularly tongue-in-cheek tribute to the series’ comparatively cerebral precursor.
While The Perfect Couple largely achieves what it sets out to do, it’s far from a clean kill. As a murder mystery, it doesn’t completely satisfy. After the first few scandals and red herrings, the show’s bag of tricks quickly gets old. By the end of its run, there are more affairs than functioning relationships, and the search for the killer has become a perfunctory process of elimination. If you’re looking for a show that resembles an Eatwell plate, this isn’t it; The Perfect Couple is a keto salad with a side of Diazepam.
“Map of the island of Nantucket, including Tuckernuck” by Norman B. Leventhal Map Center at the BPL is licensed under CC BY 2.0.