The Perfect Couple: Nicole Kidman’s opulent murder mystery is a masterclass in how to make TV

You have four choices of TV shows where there has been a mysterious death. It could be a cold town where people don’t trust the police and either a suspect or a detective is preternaturally Scottish; a sleepy English hanging-basket-packed village where there are only two police officers in the entire county and they both somehow call each other “boss”; a detective from out of town who can’t solve the case because they keep thinking about their dead wife or dead child or both; or fabulous opulence, often with Nicole Kidman in the middle. There are subgenres – Poirot on a train, a high school full of weird kids with mental health, Scandinavia – but those are more or less your choices.
To The Perfect Couple, then, a new mysterious death set among fabulous opulence with Nicole Kidman in the middle of it, which unfurls on Netflix from 5 September. It’s based on the 2018 book by “queen of beach reads” Elin Hilderbrand, and I – like you – desperately want to be really snobby about that. But The Perfect Couple has assembled an astounding cast – you’ve got the good actors from The White Lotus (Meghann Fahy), Bad Sisters (Eve Hewson) and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend (Donna Lynne Champlin), plus Liev Schreiber and Billy “I can’t believe he’s not Domhnall Gleeson” Howle – shot it very gorgeously, made “being wealthy in Nantucket” look very complicated but also very great, got the tone and the tension just right, and deployed Nicole Kidman outstandingly. I mean, that’s how you make TV, isn’t it?
The pitch is this: on the 4 July weekend, zookeeper Amelia Sacks (Hewson) and sweet-enough old money failson Benji Winbury (Howle) are doing a thing that I refuse to believe Americans do no matter how many times I see it on film and television, and that’s “having a wedding rehearsal dinner”. There are a lot of moving parts: Kidman’s ice-cutting novelist matriarch Greer Garrison Winbury being really humourless and annoyed about flowers; her husband, the unbelievably named Tag Winbury (Schreiber), is too busy smoking pot and polishing a canoe to notice that everyone alive fancies him. There’s the too-much influencer/maid-of-honour Merritt Monaco – I really should have checked how stupid these names were before I started two whole paragraphs of praise – and the pleasingly weird socialite Isabel Nallet (Isabelle Adjani). We meet a maid who knows too much and a wedding planner who bitches too much, while Dakota Fanning keeps walking around rubbing her baby bump and smiling in a really disconcertingly empty way. There is fine sand and expensive oysters, and every small bump into the invisible rules of social etiquette is met with a tight Kidman glance, and then a body washes up on shore and everyone’s a little bit too rich and self-absorbed to really care about it.
Done wrong, this would be awful. I have seen so many body-washes-up-on-shore mysteries where the narrative gets handed over to the police – one grumpy and new to town, one more naive-seeming but secretly knows the exact mechanics as to what is going on – as they go around knocking on every door, asking every witness where they were and what they were doing, and you have to watch closely to see if there’s any minor inconsistency, and then it turns out to be a red herring, and then there’s an absurd massive twist, The End. Conceivably, every single person at this wedding could have done it – including the victim themselves – and what The Perfect Couple does is dip deep into every character, flashing backwards then showing them in the aftermath of the event, drawing these great big, complex portraits of each. It never slips into the-end-of-the-episode-is-coming-up artificial tension; nobody is ever drawing a curtain back and being surprised for no reason. We are shown intrigue instead of false thrills, and the journey is so so much better for it. Everyone here, despite being called Shooter Dival or whatever, is very knowable and human.
It helps that Nicole Kidman is absolutely Kidmanning throughout. A social-climbing, highly strung matriarch who is a bit annoyed about what you wore to breakfast could be a shallow character if done wrong; here she’s brilliant, doing perfect “American grand family affected Englishness”, drinking wine, figuring out affairs and side-eyeing Tag every time he sexily lights a joint. And it helps that Jenna Lamia’s script is filled with sharp lines, too – “Miss Sacks is lovely! But she’s from eastern Pennsylvania” is one; “Oh they’re rich. Child-sex-ring-and-private-island rich” another; and the best are often handed to Kidman, such as when, in the immediate aftermath, she calls her publisher and lightly tinkles: “I know it’s such a big shock and we’re all sort of devastated here.” I’m sure the ending will find a way to annoy me. But until then, this is one of the better bodies-washing-up-on-shore shows I’ve seen.