Summary
Imperfect Women is understandably keeping its cards close to its chest in its premiere, but there’s enough compelling mystery to be going on with.
You can’t have a TV friendship without one of you dying. Those are just the rules, I think, and at least in Episode 1, Apple TV+’s Imperfect Women operates on the assumption that murder isn’t surprising to anyone, least of all the audience. There’s even a case to be made that the non-murdered friends aren’t all that shocked either, at least not the premiere’s title character, Eleanor, from whose perspective this opening hour unfolds. What does she know that she isn’t letting on? That’s clearly going to be one of the key dramatic questions as things unfold.
Eleanor isn’t the only suspect, obviously, but the focus on her creates suspicion immediately, much like how HBO’s brilliant DTF St. Louis is using a similar roving perspective to promote each character in turn to the position of prime suspect. But the premiere also introduces plenty of other people worth keeping an eye on, including the third friend, Mary, the victim’s extremely buttoned-up, off-kilter husband, Robert, and an artist fling named Davide Boyette.
What we know for certain is that Nancy is dead. One third of a thick-as-thieves triumvirate with Eleanor and Mary, Nancy was having an affair, though nobody other than Eleanor knew about it. Why she chose Eleanor and not Mary as a confidante is one of those things that I imagine will come up later, but in the meantime it’s easy to assume that Nancy believed single Eleanor, who’s having a very unofficial fling with one of her employees at the rescue and relief company she runs, would be less judgemental of an affair than happily married – or so it seems – Mary.
We know Nancy is dead because the police tell Eleanor. They ask her to identify the body, which she does, and then interrogate her. Eleanor might have been the last person to speak to her before she died, at a restaurant the previous evening, celebrating Mary’s birthday. Eleanor went to her employee’s place, Mary went home, and Nancy went to meet the increasingly pushy extramarital fling. At some point, someone smashed the back of her skull in and left her body in a park.
Imperfect Women is loose with time in Episode 1. We wind back several hours from the police interrogation to Eleanor being woken in the night by Robert, calling her to inquire about Nancy’s whereabouts. At the time, Eleanor figured Nancy had just spent the night with her lover, so she talked Robert out of calling the police and rushed over to basically confess that Nancy was fine, albeit in bed with another man. And then the police arrive with the bad news. Why Robert felt comfortable enough to call Eleanor in the middle of the night, and why Eleanor chose that moment to tell him about Nancy’s affair, are both questions worth asking. Later, Mary, after Eleanor has looped her in about both Nancy’s death and her affair, implies that there’s some sort of connection between Eleanor and Robert. I suspect we’ll get more clarity on that later.
Something’s up with Robert either way. His grief is manifesting primarily as anger, and one gets the sense that’s something he’s prone to; his own daughter, Cora, asks Eleanor to stay with them for a while, since she doesn’t feel safe around Robert. Robert also comes from an extremely wealthy family – his father is a hedge fund guy, naturally – and his Pitbull sister is sniffing around to try and keep a lid on any potential scandal. Robert doesn’t seem especially surprised or concerned that Cora is frightened of him, and you can tell when Eleanor rejects the offer to stay in the house that there’s something unspoken going on between them.
Eleanor also sees suspicious men lingering around Nancy’s funeral. But suspicious in general, or just suspicious to her? Unclear. Either way, Eleanor doesn’t believe that Davide, the artist with whom Nancy was having an affair, killed her, even after he’s named as the prime suspect in the case. Mary is clearly a bit inclined to suspect Robert, and that’s very much the implication of a scene where Eleanor discovers one of Davide’s artworks hung up in the house, and Robert attacks it. But am I the only person who kind of understands why he might have done that? His wife was hanging her lover’s paintings up in the house. It’s pretty galling when you think about it.
Not that Richard seems much better, since the premiere concludes with him inviting Eleanor to a ballet that he and Nancy were supposed to attend. Perhaps it’s just as well that some odd types are taking photos of them together. Why would a grieving husband be out gallivanting with his dead wife’s best friend when someone has only recently battered his wife to death? That’s a picture that’ll hold a thousand words, presumably.
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