Sneha Jaiswal (Twitter | Instagram)
A super-rich couple has been married for 29 years—we’re talking ‘can murder someone and get away with it’ rich—so how ‘perfect’ can they really be?
Created by Jenna Lamia and Susanne Bier, the 2024 Netflix murder mystery series The Perfect Couple is based on the bestselling novel of the same name by Elin Hilderbrand. Nicole Kidman plays Greer Garrison Winbury, a wildly successful author married to Tag Winbury (Liev Schreiber), who comes from old money. The couple is all set to host a lavish beach wedding in Nantucket for their middle son Benji (Billy Howle) and his bride Amelia Sacks (Eve Hewson), a beautiful young woman he fell in love with while watching her work at a zoo. However, a murder investigation halts the celebrations when Amelia’s maid of honor, Merritt (Meghann Fahy), washes up dead on the beach on the morning of the wedding.
The Winburys’ beachside property is stunning, and so are all the drone shots of Nantucket’s gorgeous blue waters, sand, and pretty buildings. Six episodes long, The Perfect Couple certainly gets its visual elements right, featuring a groovy intro title song with the cast joyously dancing during the wedding eve celebrations. But for a murder-mystery-thriller, it takes a long time for the series to finally get interesting.
Also Read: The Perfect Couple Ending Explained
The first few episodes are far too slow, pretentious, and annoyingly drive home the age-old message we’ve seen in countless films—rich families are largely made up of insufferable jerks. While the last two climactic episodes lean towards dark comedy, the same ‘not-so-serious’ tone is missing in the first half of the series. What begins as a serious psychological thriller, such as Fool Me Once, shifts toward the comedic mystery style of Glass Onion, two vastly different titles.
The investigation into Merritt’s death is led by cops Dan Carter (Michael Beach) and Nikki Henry (Donna Lynne Champlin), and their characters get more screen time than is necessary to keep the thriller pacy. Until the duo can figure out who killed Merritt, nobody can leave the island. The devastated Amelia is stuck with her future in-laws, which include Benji’s prick of an older brother Thomas Winbury (Jack Reynor), Thomas’ caustic pregnant wife Abby (Dakota Fanning), and the youngest teen brother Will (Sam Nivola). Thomas is so toxic that Benji picked his childhood friend Shooter Dival (Ishaan Khatter) to be his best man, despite being Thomas’ best man in the past. As the investigation progresses, several secrets of the Winbury family and friends come out, making the police wonder if there’s more to Merritt’s death than meets the eye.
Everybody in the cast is fantastic, but none of the characters are likable, and with six episodes to go, they can become overbearing. For instance, Nicole Kidman is excellent as the ice-queen Greer Garrison Winbury, a hoity-toity big-shot author who doesn’t seem to approve of Amelia and is always micro-managing everybody. She is obsessed with maintaining a ‘perfect family’ façade for the press, especially since she is consistently churning out novels and is in the limelight. Interestingly, Nicole also played an author in her last Netflix film A Family Affair, but her author avatar in that was a lot ‘chiller’. While Greer is all about work, Liev Schreiber’s Tag is all about alcohol, weed, and play.
Isabelle Adjani is entertainingly comical as Isabel Nallet, an old family friend and a French-spouting seductress who is sleeping with a younger married man. Dendrie Taylor and Michael McGrady play Amelia’s sweet, simple parents, Karen and Bruce Sacks. Karen suffers from cancer, and due to her deteriorating health, Benji and Amelia’s wedding is fast-tracked, which becomes a significant point of contention in the series. The first thought that popped into my head when Merritt is found dead in the first episode was: did someone kill her just to cancel the wedding? Of course, that’s a ridiculous and extremely frivolous reason to murder someone, but you never know with wealthy individuals.
While two characters have obvious motives to murder the vivacious Merritt, a lot of circumstantial evidence leads to the cops getting conflicted between multiple suspects, much like a classic Agatha Christie mystery. And in a nice little nod to the queen of murder mysteries, Greer Garrison Winbury says, “I had an Agatha Christie obsession, didn’t I?” when asked about the inspiration for her own books. And of course, we have the usual red herrings.
Given the talented cast, The Perfect Couple could have been much more entertaining if the creators had maintained a consistent tone and trimmed down the ‘bookish’ banter with more believable, conversational dialogue. Regardless, it manages to pick up pace in the climactic episode and throws in two good twists that wrap the investigation with an unlikely ending.
Rating: 6 on 10. You can watch The Perfect Couple on Netflix.
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