This story includes heavy spoilers for all six episodes of The Perfect Couple. At this point, there’s a whole subgenre of murder-mystery series revolving around someone who dies while in the company of a bunch of rich people. Since Big Little Lies became a runaway hit, several must-watch TV shows, like The Undoing and The White Lotus—and many predictable, missable titles—have followed suit. Netflix’s latest rich-white-people-behaving-badly series, The Perfect Couple, hit streaming on September 5, 2024.
The show, based on Elin Hilderbrand's novel of the same name, follows a formula many will be familiar with and is even notably helmed by The Undoing director Susanne Bier and features alum from both The Undoing and The White Lotus(!). Starring an A-list cast led by Nicole Kidman and Liev Schreiber as the matriarch and patriarch of the Winburys, an elite family of old-money WASPs on Nantucket, The Perfect Couple sees their family unravel when someone dies the night before their son Benji’s (Billy Howle) wedding. The wedding had already been tense among the Winburys, particularly famed author Greer Garrison Winbury (Kidman) who disapproved of her son tying the knot with the more working-class zoologist Amelia (Eve Hewson). So when Amelia’s longtime best friend and maid of honor Merritt (Meghann Fahy) is found dead, floating along the shoreline outside of the Winbury’s estate known as Summerland, even more melodrama ensues.
