The Undoing review: Prestige TV series squanders the potential of its star power

With considerable star power and an impressive pedigree of creative forces, The Undoing is hoping to seduce audiences.

HBO drama The Undoing has the star power, creative forces and expensive budget to be a top-notch prestige series.

But something went awry in the translation from concept to screen because the Nicole Kidman and Hugh Grant-led six-part series, starting today on Binge*, is mixed at best.

Commanding performances from Kidman, Grant and Donald Sutherland is undercut by writer David E. Kelley’s predilection for moody and meandering at the expense of narrative momentum while filmmaker Susanne Bier’s heavy-handed direction makes for a sometimes-arduous viewing experience.

Adapted from Jean Hanff Korelitz’s novel You Should’ve Known, the series focuses on Grace Fraser (Kidman), a well-to-do New York therapist who seemingly has an ideal life.

When the mother of a student at her son’s exclusive school (Matilda De Angelis) is found murdered, it ruptures her life. On the same day, her husband Jonathan (Grant) vanishes and police show up at her door. Everything Grace thought she knew has been shaken.

Nicole Kidman was also a producer on The Undoing

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Despite its impressive pedigree, The Undoing is a disorderly, too-familiar series with occasional moments of spark.

It’s at its most indulgent and melodramatic in the second episode in which Bier overuses slow-motion and incongruous extreme close-ups, ostensibly as a way to portray Grace’s increasingly fractured emotional state.

But without restraint, the effect is akin to motion sickness, a laboured creative choice that reads as an attempt to recreate Jean-Marc Vallee’s style in Big Little Lies. But visual poetry it is not.

It would be enough to make you abandon the series if not for the fact that Kidman’s screen presence is so hypnotic, like a siren song to a drunk sailor.

There are some stronger scenes as the series goes on, relationship dynamics that carry the burden including Kidman and Sutherland’s father-daughter pairing. These scenes have an emotional gravitas to them, and you find yourself perking up every time Sutherland – definitely a standout here – is on screen.

And the courtroom scenes in episode five have an energy missing elsewhere in the show, perhaps due to Kelley’s vast experience in legal dramas having created The Practice, Ally McBeal and Boston Legal and written for LA Law.

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While the comparisons to Big Little Lies are the most obvious thanks to Kidman and Kelley’s work on both, it’s actually another slow-moving HBO crime drama that The Undoing evokes, The Night Of.

While The Night Of is a richly textured series that took care to round out all its characters, so they felt as if they existed even when they weren’t on the screen, The Undoing falls short.

Someone like Edgar Ramirez is wasted as the lead detective in The Undoing, a character so unimpressionable, you won’t even remember his name.

The Night Of also engaged with the city and its social fabric in a more considered way.

It’s baffling how incurious The Undoing is about the city it’s set in. It spends so much time trying to world-build this environment of rich white New Yorkers on the upper east side (an already familiar cultural trope) but then doesn’t bother exploring what that means for how this crime would realistically play out in the city.

The Undoing features a top-notch cast including Nicole Kidman and Hugh Grant

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There’s a line uttered by the Frasers’ lawyer Haley Fitzgerald (Noma Dumezweni) in which she argues that lying is what rich entitled people do to protect themselves.

It’s a line that’s used in voiceover in the trailer, setting up an expectation that The Undoing will delve into the rot underneath the veneer of penthouses, private schools and privilege. Instead, it’s only ever raised, not investigated.

That omission is particularly glaring given the victim is a young, Latina woman from Harlem, whose eroticisation and othering is frequently foregrounded. She’s also one of those female murder victims who don’t seem to have a characterisation of her own.

That’s all par for the course in a Law & Order episode – which this story sometimes feels like it could’ve been (ie. wrapped up in 42 minutes) – but you would expect a prestige series to be more interested in the impact of the crime beyond the hermetically sealed core family unit, especially when that focus wasn’t substantial enough to stretch over six episodes.

Donald Sutherland and Nicole Kidman’s on-screen relationship dynamic is the series’ most compelling

You can see what The Undoing was aiming for, a searing, interior examination of betrayal and what we really know of the people in our own homes, the people we share our lives with.

And despite Kidman’s best attempts to gift audiences exactly that, the writing didn’t back it up and the disfluent direction did it no favours – unless it all somehow changes in the final episode, which wasn’t made available for review.

There’s no doubt the kind of show The Undoing wanted to be, but much of it feels like squandered potential.

The Undoing starts streaming on Binge on Monday, October 26

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*Binge is majority owned by News Corp, publisher of news.com.au