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With its prestigious cast and idyllic settings – the small, bourgeois island of Nantucket, in New England – The Perfect Couple (A perfect couple) has all the makings of a late summer hit. Especially since it features a now regular on the small screen, Nicole Kidman, whose tall figure gives the series, adapted from a novel by the American Elin Hilderbrand, an extra touch of glamour.
For once, the Australian plays a role that is fitting for her 57 years. Greer Winbury is a successful crime writer who is preparing to marry her youngest son – she has three – in the luxurious villa where she spends the summer with her husband, Tag (Liev Schreiber). It is during the sumptuous rehearsal dinner that we get to know the guests, the bridesmaids and groomsmen, as well as the future bride and groom, Benji (Billy Howle) and Amelia (Eve Hewson, seen in the series Bad Sisters in 2022), a young woman of much more modest origins.
Although everyone pretends to have fun, the evening is rife with tension, and we can guess that this union, which Greer Winbury disapproves of, does not start under the best auspices. The next morning, a few hours before the wedding, a corpse fished out of the water puts an end to the festivities.
Deadly secrets
The Cluedo-style investigation that follows is obviously less interesting than what it will reveal about the unhealthy dynamics shaking the Winbury family, and the deadly secrets that its members hide. If A perfect couple does not have the satirical power of its distant cousin HBO, The White Lotus (2021 and 2022), the suspicion that weighs on each character in turn reveals the same cruelty, the same violence of human relationships, which we like to believe systematically goes with great wealth.
The series takes this stance with a certain effectiveness, notably in its staging of the couple formed by Greer and Tag, a mixture of mutual admiration and resentment, blunted by twenty-nine years of living together, but whose seam must not give way. To hold on, Tag wastes his days polishing the wood of his boats and smoking joints. Greer produces copy day and night to keep afloat finances that are more fragile than one might think, and exercises total tyranny over her household, for fear of being exposed herself.
This hypercontrol, which is also often that of actresses who are getting older, Kidman embodies it better than anyone. It is, unsurprisingly, around her that the series unfolds, and the actress here finds a form of vigor and energy that we had not seen in her for a while.
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