Please cowl your eyes if you happen to aren’t ready to be spoiled: The eponymous, lovely pair on the coronary heart of Netflix’s The Excellent Couple isn’t excellent, neither is the present particularly about mentioned couple.
To be clear, the sequence largely exists as a result of if you happen to squint and solely pay half consideration to it whereas scrolling your telephone, The Excellent Couple could possibly be mistaken for 2 higher reveals: Massive Little Lies and White Lotus. Identical to these splashy HBO hits, The Excellent Couple facilities round a lifeless physique that shatters the lives of very rich Caucasian folks. Equally, the feminine characters on the present are married to human items of rubbish who might or might not even be murderers. And on the coronary heart of all of it is a really frazzled, very wealthy girl on the verge of a whole meltdown.
In fact, viewers are right here for Oscar and Emmy winner Nicole Kidman, whose wigs are all the time filled with secrets and techniques. This time, she’s enjoying a matriarch whose moniker is simply three final names and is a part of one of many wealthiest households in Nantucket.
The Excellent Couple culminates in lots of ultimate twists: a sex-work-related origin story; a barbiturate-laced drink and a drowning; an illegitimate child; and the reveal of a convoluted belief fund scenario. However extra intriguing than any of the twists on this sequence is maybe what it says about Nicole Kidman herself. Within the final 4 years, Kidman has acted in six tv sequence. 4 of these sequence contain wealthy white girls and a few type of demise shrouded in suspicion, if not an out-and-out homicide thriller.
“I used to be an es-scort!” Kidman’s Greer Garrison Winbury shiver-shouts within the ultimate episode, explaining to her household that she was a intercourse employee and that their father and potential homicider Tag (Liev Schreiber) was a john.
“3 times! All proper? And now I pay for eve-r-ything!” she hisses (Kidman’s accent jumps from Australia to Boston in three syllables), revealing that Greer Garrison Winbury has receipts. “I’m not cleansing the whole lot up for you. I’m accomplished together with your ego. I’m accomplished together with your bullshit. I’m accomplished. Do you hear me? Accomplished. I’m not caring for the whole lot for everybody anymore.” It’s all sudsy, excessive — rather more deliriously scrumptious than the opposite adjacent-to-murder girls Kidman has performed in recent times.
The aforementioned two seasons of Massive Little Lies featured Kidman as Celeste Wright, a wealthy former lawyer and now Monterrey stay-at-home mother with an abusive, adulterous, and freshly lifeless husband that’s all based mostly on a Liane Moriarty novel. In 2020’s The Undoing, additionally an adaptation, she performs Grace Fraser, a wealthy Manhattan psychologist with an adulterous, murdery husband. Hulu’s 9 Excellent Strangers (2021) is one other Moriarty adaptation. In that one, Kidman performs chilling wellness coach Masha Dmitrichenko, who medicine visitors with psilocybin at her retreat and was shot as soon as (however not murdered). In Expats, tailored from a 2016 novel by Janice Y.Ok. Lee, which premiered on Amazon this 12 months, Kidman performs Margaret Woo, a uncared for spouse mourning the kidnapping (and demise) of her son whereas additionally investigating a just lately deceased neighbor because the potential kidnapper-pedophile-murderer.
If there’s a narrative through which a frazzled wealthy white girl is barely aloof but extraordinarily adjoining to nefarious hijinks, Nicole Kidman, her agent, and a streaming service aren’t far behind. Bonus factors if it’s based mostly on a guide touted as a seashore learn and written by Moriarty.
Kidman’s selections and work ethic have come below slightly little bit of scrutiny. She’s not making sufficient severe stuff and maybe is in slightly an excessive amount of tv for a severe actress, the argument goes. However that undercuts an actress who has already gained high awards in each motion pictures and tv, and can also be producing the reveals she’s starring in. She’s doing what she desires to do, and from the extreme wiggery to the chewy monologues about what number of precise instances she charged her now-husband for intercourse, it looks as if she’s having loads of enjoyable creating these fizzy melodramas. And Kidman has famously admitted to taking roles for the enjoyable of it!
The extra you watch Kidman’s numerous blonde lace fronts and accents, the extra it appears like she’s in on the joke or committing to a bit, taking the morbidity and macabre out of demise by stealing the highlight together with her routine portrayal of those soapy protagonists. Enjoying Greer Garrison Winbury is simply her newest position in a narrative the place demise capabilities like an incredible equalizer, as it’s the solely factor the wealthy can’t use their thousands and thousands of {dollars} to cover from (particularly if a SOB husband occurs to be a assassin).
What’s it about homicide mysteries and prosperous girls that speaks to Nicole Kidman? Does she like tv greater than motion pictures? Is there some type of enjoyable enjoying rich girls with terrible, probably murderous husbands? Does she simply actually need to be in a season of White Lotus however is just too well-known?
We’re free to provide you with our personal conclusions concerning the why for her, however that Kidman retains giving us these six- to eight-episode seasons as breadcrumbs is a part of the pleasure.