Summary
A Perfect Story can’t live up to its title, delivering a cliched romance lacking novelty and engagement.
This review of the Netflix series A Perfect Story Season 1 does not contain spoilers.
Forgive me for being insufferably trite, but A Perfect Story isn’t a perfect story.
No story is, of course, but a title like that is asking for trouble – especially when the show itself is a fairly light rom-com without as much rom or com as you’d think.
Still, it’s a five-episode miniseries, which is barely an investment by contemporary binge-watch standards, it’s coming from Spain, a region with a much more comprehensive grasp of romance than the U.K. or the U.S., and it’s adapted from a book by Elísabet Benavent, so you’d think the literary underpinnings would give it a degree of some sophistication.
A Perfect Story Season 1 review and plot summary
Unfortunately, “sophisticated” isn’t the word I’d use.
In many ways it’s all too familiar for its own good. Margot is the wealthy heiress of a hospitality fortune fleeing her own wedding – and the subsequent online roasting – and David is a heartbroken working man juggling three jobs and stinging from being kicked in the financials by an ex-girlfriend.
Can these two ever find love together? Well, of course they can.
Or can they? The “hook” of A Perfect Story, if you want to use that term, is that it settles into that oft-neglected middle stage of a relationship, the one between meet-cute and commitment. Margot and David spend a lot of the series as friends, initially trying to make David’s ex jealous after a chance meeting.
This, it turns out, is a rather bland angle for a romance, especially one with an ending you can see coming from a mile away. The trudge through various picturesque locales just feels like biding our time until we get to the stuff that most romantic shows and movies base their entire runtimes around. The will-they-won’t-they dynamic only works if there’s a chance that they won’t.
Of course, very often people want predictability in stories like this. They thrive on it, in fact, and the way to critique them – if such a thing is even possible or worthwhile, which is another story entirely – is to look at the leads and their chemistry. It’s hard to fault A Perfect Story in that regard. The leads are charming. You can believe they’d get together.
The problem is that there’s so much certainty in them getting together, even despite valiant efforts to convince us to the contrary, that there’s very little tension or engagement in watching them actually do it.
Is A Perfect Story good or bad?
A Perfect Story has nothing new to offer the genre, and in fact, spends quite a lot of time idling in the phase of a relationship that most rom-coms rightly skip over. The performances are perfectly fine, but it’s in service of a trite, predictable story that will likely fail to keep most viewers engaged even across five episodes. The Netflix thumbnails are replete with better offerings.
Is A Perfect Story worth watching?
The usual crowd may well eat this up, and fair play to them, but to anyone who isn’t usually a fan of the genre or who is but is looking for something a little more novel from it, A Perfect Story is probably going to leave them wanting.
What did you think of A Perfect Story Season 1? Comment below.
You can watch this series with a subscription to Netflix.
