Charley Ross
We’re telling you now: Netflix‘s The Perfect Couple is perfectly addictive viewing.
Starring Nicole Kidman, Bad Sisters star Eve Hewson, Dakota Fanning and The Bold Type‘s Meghann Fahy, this star-studded series is adapted from Elin Hilderbrand’s novel, which revolves around the doomed wedding of newcomer to the wealthy Winbury family, Amelia Sacks (Hewson). The matriarch of the family Greer (Kidman) seems to disapprove of Amelia, but all is thrown up in the air when a member of the wedding party dies the night before the wedding – everyone, rich or poor, becomes a suspect.
But what The Perfect Couple really is at its core is six delicious episodes of rich people behaving absolutely atrociously – with genius comedic timing – and us as an audience delighting in it and simultaneously keenly awaiting their downfall.
Multiple affairs and abuses of power are revealed throughout, with NDAs quickly served to protect members of the Winbury family. Money is thrown (or at least threatened to be thrown) at unethical transgressions instead of actual acceptance of bad behaviour. Two of the Winbury brothers even end up wrestling over what is undoubtedly an unspeakably expensive wedding cake. Economic cost means nothing, and the family clearly believes themselves to be above not just the law, but basic morals. This is demonstrated over and over when multiple members of the family come under suspicion of murder.
Liev Schreiber’s character Tag, in particular, clearly seems to believe that he can outrun any wrongdoing due to his wealth. His oldest son, Thomas, is your classic misogynistic, aggressive finance bro who acts like a spoiled child. The women are crafted slightly differently, quieter but no less deadly in their scoundrel behaviour. Nicole Kidman simmers as the family’s matriarch Greer – when she’s not in PR damage control mode to protect the family’s ailing reputation, she is subtly undermining relative commoner Amelia with the sweetest of smiles. Dakota Fanning’s Abby – Thomas’ pregnant wife – and her smooth delivery of slut shaming, salacious in-family sh*t stirring and all-around snobbery is pure genius. We can’t stand her, but we’d probably still want her to like us if we met her.
The new Netflix TV series, just like Succession, The White Lotus – even shows like The Undoing and Big Little Lies, both also starring Nicole Kidman, as well as Desperate Housewives and Gossip Girl for those with an early Noughties fixation – revolves around seriously unlikeable rich people doing terrible things, being terrible people, and getting away with it. For a certain stretch of time, anyway. Emerald Fennell’s divisive Saltburn also scratched this itch, particularly with Rosamund Pike’s Lady Elspeth Catton delighting and repulsing audiences in equal measure with her universal aversion to “ugliness” and her sweetly-delivered offensive comments, including calling a friend’s suicide “attention seeking”.
“When people have wealth and privilege, it can sometimes be harder to conform behaviour to social standards, because there is little cost for not doing so,” mindset psychologist Dr Rebekah Wanic explains.