The Perfect Couple is best described as a beach-read come to life

Nicole Kidman and Liev Schrieber play the wealthy parents of a groom whose wedding celebrations are crashed by a cadaver in this Netflix series based on the Elin Hilderbrand novel.

Nicole Kidman as Greer Winbury in The Perfect Couple, and Liev Schreiber as her husband Tag in The Perfect Couple. Picture: Seacia Pavao

The most notable thing about the Nantucket nabobs at the centre of The Perfect Couple is that “they’re rich”. How rich?

“Sex-ring-on-a-private-island rich,” wedding planner Roger Peloton (Tim Bagley) says. “ ‘I’m bored – let’s go buy a monkey’ rich. Kill someone and get away with it rich.” The police nod knowingly; the Atlantic coughs up a school of red herrings.

A dead body washes up, too, though for most of the initial episode you don’t know whose it is. You do, however, learn a lot, right away, about our assembled wedding invitees. One of the things to admire about this six-part series, developed by Jenna Lamia and directed by Susanne Bier (The Undoing), is the craft involved in adapting the Elin Hilderbrand novel (No.3 in her Nantucket series). Shoving the story off amid a minimum of narrative flotsam, it frames its characters immediately as repellently snide, irredeemably weak or, in the case of wealthy wastrel and patriarch Tag Winbury (Liev Schreiber), perpetually stoned. Enormously helpful in propelling us past the shoals of family history and motives is the setting – the July 4th weekend rehearsal dinner for Benji Winbury (Billy Howle) and Amelia Sacks (Eve Hewson) and a possible crime scene. What the wedding videographer doesn’t get while interviewing the guests the police get while interrogating the suspects.

These include the employees at the $40m Summerland estate, who are more than willing to badmouth the Winburys (see Roger, above), especially mystery novelist/asp-tongued mother Greer.

While Nicole Kidman is making a habit out of these female-centric, soapy suspense thrillers, Greer is a bit outside her type, a Brit-accented, status-conscious swan who delivers compliments as if holding a dagger behind her back.

Each character in The Perfect Couple is hateable for a different reason – even Amelia, who is arguably the protagonist: Her marrying-up to trust-fund baby and movie-dog-namesake Benji is, aside from the corpse, the most disturbing element in the series, at least for her prospective in-laws.

And she knows how to push Greer’s buttons – she suggests, mischievously, that the wedding flowers could be carnations from the local Stop & Shop. Greer blanches, but her opinion is what matters to everyone’s self-worth – she’s that kind of person. Thus The Perfect Couple is, on the strength of personality, her story.

Greer is also paying the bills, which is one of the story’s clumsier devices, though Schreiber, as a virtually inert character who practices his chip shot by aiming at seagulls, is a joy to behold.

All the vast Winbury money is said to be tied up in trusts, which will be paid out to the kids – dopey Benji, obnoxious Thomas (Jack Reynor) and winsome Will (Sam Nivola) –when the youngest, Will, turns 18. This will become an issue, notably for Abby (Dakota Fanning), wife of Thomas and a woman who says “sorry” a lot while never meaning it. Troubling too (spoiler alert) is Tag’s affair with Amelia’s pal, the beautiful Merritt “like the parkway” Monaco, along with the class distinctions that lie around every corner of the story. A character’s taste in mustard (yellow is declasse); how one pronounces “barbiturates”; whether one washes one’s own dishes. If you do, Gosia the maid (Irina Dubova), the biggest snob in the story, will regard you as trash.

But Greer and her very successful pop novels are meanwhile supporting a rather lavish domestic lifestyle along with the family’s status in the village. This is something that Tag, when he doesn’t have a giant spliff between his fingers, emphasises to police chief Dan Carter (Michael Beach) at any point where the investigation into the body – and the Winburys – grows intrusive.

Carter is well aware of the political oyster shells upon which he treads, but the off-island detective sent to help him, Nikki Henry (Donna Lynne Champlin), has no concerns about local decorum and bulls her way around town with a certain amount of glee.

She’s a curious character (Champlin is first rate). She harbours enough obvious resentment toward the privileged to make her an unreliable cop. But she also mirrors precisely the biases that Lamia, Bier and even Hilderbrand want to encourage among their audience, a presumption that crazy rich families are all craven, narcissistic bordering on sociopathic, and destined to tragically fail. Hard to say if any of that is true, as regards real life or the show, but The Perfect Couple is best described as a beach-read come to life.

The Perfect Couple streaming on Netflix.
Graeme Blundell is on leave.