Summary
The Perfect Couple is a proper whodunit, but it smartly refuses to take itself too seriously. The result is a murder mystery that is still about things but cares most about providing a throwback good time.
It wouldn’t take much effort to count up the obvious influences running through the veins of The Perfect Couple, Netflix’s six-part all-star whodunit. Both Knives Out movies are big ones, in setting, premise, tone, and themes. Another is The White Lotus. A third – and fourth, and fifth, and sixth, at least – is anything Nicole Kidman has been in that has required her to play a well-to-do woman with a bit of a superior attitude.
All the hallmarks are there. There’s a big, game cast full of great and beautiful actors, a gorgeous, isolated location – in this case a sprawling estate on Nantucket – and a lot of knitwear. Oh, and a dead body, obviously.
We’ll get to that in a minute. In the meantime – once you’re done taking in the view – we’ll start with Kidman’s character, Greer Garrison Winbury, a renowned and extraordinarily wealthy novelist who has been married to her husband, Tag (Live Schreiber), for almost three decades. They are – all together now – the perfect couple, or at least so it seems.
Greer and Tag have three children, all boys – Thomas (Jack Reynor), Benji (Billy Howle), and Will (Sam Nivola), the latter of whom is about to turn 18, thus releasing the very substantial trust fund for all of the siblings to split. This, needless to say, will become important later.
Benji is due to marry Amelia Sacks (Eve Hewson), a working-class girl from circumstances so normal that Greer is horrified by them, so a substantial wedding party is being hosted on Nantucket for the rehearsal dinner and then, hopefully, the wedding. But no such luck. The next morning, Amelia’s Maid of Honor, Merritt Monaco (Meghann Fahy, who is in The White Lotus so feels right at home), is found dead, and it becomes obvious rather swiftly that foul play was involved.
On the case are local police chief Dan Carter (Michael Beach) and big city blow-in Detective Nikki Henry (Donna Lynne Champlin). And they have their work cut out since everyone is a suspect, including everyone mentioned above, Thomas’s pregnant wife Abby (Dakota Fanning having the time of her life), the family’s put-upon housekeeper Gosia (Irina Dubova), Benji’s best man, Shooter (Ishaan Khattar), and a French friend of the family played by Isabelle Adjani, wielding weapons-grade scorn.
The Perfect Couple | Image via Netflix
The plot of The Perfect Couple unfolds in a medley of present-day sequences and flashbacks, with the policework being mostly contained to the station and only weaving into the complex interpersonal family dynamics when it’s time to introduce a new clue or suspect. This style works perfectly since it doesn’t bog the plot down with details but allows each new revelation to reveal more about different characters.
Since there are so many characters, it’s a minor miracle that this show works at all, let alone as well as it does. But the reveals are perfectly spaced apart, the twists are logical and set up neatly in advance, and some of the turns are genuinely surprising. Even the ones that aren’t are elevated by a cast operating at the top of their games, and a very smart script – it was adapted by Jenna Lamia from the same-titled book by Elin Hilderbrand – that knows not to take itself too seriously.
That self-awareness turns a very good whodunit into a potentially great one. There are key sequences that surprise you not just with their reveals but by their tone, with serious developments coming in the midst of very funny back-and-forths that somehow doesn’t undermine the darker elements of the plot and themes.
Themes! Yes, The Perfect Couple is very much about wealth and class disparity, deadly greed and how the whims of the powerful cannot be contained, but it’s not about them in a boring, preachy way. Instead, they’re background colour for a whip-smart murder mystery that rattles along at a lovely pace and creates binge-worthy entertainment for as long as it lasts.
You can’t say fairer than that.
If you’re not concerned about spoilers, my full season recap breaks down the entire show, and we even have a dedicated article explaining The Perfect Couple’s ending. Aren’t we good to you?
