Please cowl your eyes for those who aren’t ready to be spoiled: The eponymous, lovely pair on the coronary heart of Netflix’s The Excellent Couple isn’t good, neither is the present particularly about mentioned couple.
To be clear, the sequence largely exists as a result of for those who squint and solely pay half consideration to it whereas scrolling your telephone, The Excellent Couple could possibly be mistaken for 2 higher reveals: Big Little Lies and White Lotus. Identical to these splashy HBO hits, The Excellent Couple facilities round a useless 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 could or could not even be murderers. And on the coronary heart of all of it is a really frazzled, very wealthy girl on the verge of an entire meltdown.
After all, viewers are right here for Oscar and Emmy winner Nicole Kidman, whose wigs are at all times stuffed with secrets and techniques. This time, she’s taking part in 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 remaining 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 state of affairs. 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 sort of dying 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 remaining episode, explaining to her household that she was a intercourse employee and that their father and doable 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 every part up for you. I’m achieved along with your ego. I’m achieved along with your bullshit. I’m achieved. Do you hear me? Completed. I’m not taking good care of every part 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 Huge Little Lies featured Kidman as Celeste Wright, a wealthy former lawyer and now Monterrey stay-at-home mother with an abusive, adulterous, and freshly useless 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 company with psilocybin at her retreat and was shot as soon as (however not murdered). In Expats, tailored from a 2016 novel by Janice Y.Okay. Lee, which premiered on Amazon this yr, Kidman performs Margaret Woo, a uncared for spouse mourning the kidnapping (and dying) of her son whereas additionally investigating a not too long ago deceased neighbor because the doable kidnapper-pedophile-murderer.
If there’s a narrative during 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 decisions and work ethic have come beneath somewhat little bit of scrutiny. She’s not making sufficient critical stuff and maybe is in somewhat an excessive amount of tv for a critical actress, the argument goes. However that undercuts an actress who has already received prime awards in each motion pictures and tv, and can also be producing the shows she’s starring in. She’s doing what she needs to do, and from the extreme wiggery to the chewy monologues about what number of actual occasions she charged her now-husband for intercourse, it looks like 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 seems like she’s in on the joke or committing to a bit, taking the morbidity and macabre out of death by stealing the highlight along with her routine portrayal of those soapy protagonists. Taking part in Greer Garrison Winbury is simply her newest position in a narrative the place dying features like a terrific equalizer, as it’s the solely factor the wealthy can’t use their hundreds of 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 sort of enjoyable taking part in rich girls with terrible, probably murderous husbands? Does she simply actually wish to be in a season of White Lotus however is just too well-known?
We’re free to give you 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.
