TV review: If you liked The White Lotus, you... won't like The Perfect Couple
Billy Howle, Nicole Kidman, Sam Nivola and Jack Reynor star in The Perfect Couple. Cr. Hilary Bronwyn Gayle/Netflix © 2024
If you liked The White Lotus, you won’t like (Netflix). They’re both cut from the same reel, but is much better.
It’s cookie-cutter TV at this stage. has super-rich sexy white Americans in a beauty spot, a body floating in the water and a cast that would make you think this is going to be great.
Nicole Kidman, Dakota Fanning, Eve Hewson and Liev Schreiber are some of the big names on the credits. Meghann Fahy is there too, fresh from her eye-catching spot on . Unfortunately there isn’t enough in the characters to make you want to watch it for more than 30 minutes. And no amount of plot can save that.
The plot of won’t blow you away. The Winbury family and friends are gathered in a seaside mansion in Nantucket for the wedding of one of their sons to Amelia, played by Hewson. It starts promisingly with a carefully choreographed, ick-inducing dance by all the guests, you can nearly smell the smug. But after that it plodded along with dialogue so cliched that myself and my wife were able to guess some sentences before they got to the end. At least we got some entertainment out of it.
All the levers are pushed here. There is a middle-aged man with sex addiction. The identity of the floating corpse isn’t revealed immediately — borrowed straight from . Entitled rich people are mean to the help and then rude to investigating detectives. And still there isn’t enough to make me care.
They throw away Nicole Kidman here. Remember her character in — delicate, erotic, vulnerable and then vengeful. There is none of that depth in . She plays a successful thriller writer with a dark secret which isn’t that dark — her main note here is one of vague disappointment with her kids, and a touch of disdain for her husband, Tag Winbury. It’s all half-arsed and none of it is down to Kidman... the writing is the problem.
It’s time to stop making "oh, look at the rich people, aren’t they awful" shows. and did it properly and now we’re just getting hyped up mini-series with all the verve of a TV movie from 1994.
If you want muzak TV that shows a few nice images while you scroll your phone at night, this might just work. But if you’re looking for a meaty show that will take the edge off the evenings closing in, you’ll need to keep looking.
