A beautiful setting, a high-profile and telegenic cast, seduction, suspense, a murder mystery, and a top-tier director — I’ll say this for Netflix’s upcoming The Perfect Couple, the stars of which include Nicole Kidman and Liev Schreiber: On paper, at least, it’s got everything it needs to be a winner.
Based on the New York Times bestselling novel of the same name by Elin Hilderbrand, the series — set against the cobblestone, cedar-shingled, white-trimmed New England aesthetic of Nantucket — certainly looks fantastic. Its director, Susanne Bier, also has a great body of past work (like Bird Box, The Night Manager, and The Undoing), while the rest of the cast includes phenomenal younger talent like Eve Hewson, and The White Lotus’ Meghann Fahy.
I’ll be honest, I don’t typically go for murder mysteries, but for all of these reasons and more, I’m super-intrigued and dying, no pun intended, to check this one out when it hits the streamer on Sept. 5.
What the six-episode series is actually about: Per Netflix, “Picture this: Nantucket. Summertime. Beautiful weather. Our heroine is deeply in love and about to marry her ideal man, handsome and from an extremely well-to-do family (in fact, the wealthiest family on the island). But when she wakes up on the morning of her wedding, a body is found floating in the harbor. Instead of attending the wedding of the year, the guests are now all suspects.”
That body found floating in Nantucket Harbor is Merritt Monaco (played by Fahy), the bride’s best friend and maid of honor.
If you’ve read the book, then you know that the story is told from multiple perspectives — including that of the bride-to-be, the groom’s parents, and the local police chief. The different perspectives add interesting layers to the story and reveal complicated relationships, hidden motives, and past indiscretions.
Add this one to your Netflix watchlist, if for no other reason than that there is a lot of talent both on- and off-camera here. In addition to the already-mentioned names, the showrunner is Good Girls’ Jenna Lamia, and the executive producers include Stranger Things’ Shawn Levy.
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