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?
