Why the Story Feels Familiar

When Netflix released the trailer for The Perfect Couple—a classic eat-the-rich murder mystery starring Nicole Kidman, Meghann Fahy, and Dakota Fanning—the reaction on my social media feed was one of collective glee. In the miniseries, based on a novel by queen of Nantucket drama Elin Hilderbrand, Kidman plays Greer Garrison Winbury—a best-selling writer and the controlling, etiquette-obsessed matriarch of her old-money family. Greer is a mixture of Desperate Housewives lead Bree Van de Kamp, Real Housewives star Lisa Vanderpump, and Game of Thrones villain (or antihero?) Cersei Lannister. In other words, she feels specifically designed to release screams of “Mother!” from gay men everywhere.

Watching The Perfect Couple, I couldn’t escape the feeling that I’d seen this story before. Kidman’s recent roles on shows like Big Little Lies and The Undoing have made her a pop cultural shorthand for the “wealthy white woman in crisis” archetype, so much so that Netflix’s sell for the series needed just six words: “Rich family. Dead body. Nicole Kidman.” Greer’s wardrobe, wigs, and British accent—which is only the third-most ridiculous accent in this show—make her seem like Gay Twitter’s Frankenstein creation. Truthfully, the entire series feels like a work of social media fan fiction, designed to elicit a response of “Inject it into my veins!” from people whose weekly screen-time reports are a source of shame.

I’ve been getting this exact feeling about a lot of upcoming projects lately, like Luca Guadagnino’s Queer—a gay romance in 1940s Mexico starring Daniel Craig and Drew Starkey, which premiered earlier this week at the Venice Film Festival. (Craig also plays gay detective Benoit Blanc in Netflix’s Knives Out franchise—but more on that later.) Or an upcoming duo of A24 projects: Marty Supreme—a Ping-Pong movie starring Hollywood’s favorite twink, Timothée Chalamet, alongside skiing enthusiast Gwyneth Paltrow in her first non-Marvel movie role in years; and Mother Mary—a “pop melodrama” in which Anne Hathaway will perform songs written by Charli XCX and Jack Antonoff, costarring Hunter Schafer and Michaela Coel. I will be seated for all of these films, which sound like they could be incredible, but I do find myself wondering: At what point does the preview hype start to obscure the actual quality of the work? Studios know how to create a project that will go viral, but catering to our existing tastes doesn’t always capture the zeitgeist. In fact, there is a pattern emerging, where projects that feel like they’re made to dominate our social feeds end up selling themselves — and us, the viewers — short.

The Perfect Couple is an undeniably entertaining show and fulfills the biggest requirement of a murder mystery: keeping us guessing (and watching) right until the end. But like the family it depicts, it is notably imperfect. Fahy—an actor whose dizzying talents were on full display in season two of HBO’s The White Lotus—feels underutilized. The show’s seaside setting and use of police interviews as a narration device feel eerily similar to Big Little Lies, to the point where it feels a little lazy. And some of the dialogue is so hammy, it sounds like it was written by AI. (“I love this woman to death,” one character says, in a flashback hours before the murder happens. “Have you ever loved someone so much you’d kill for them?” asks another.)

Most of the characters, and the actors playing them, feel similarly predictable: the handsome adulterer husband, the douchebag brother, the sensitive and nerdy brother, the blonde bombshell murder victim, and, of course, the “no-nonsense” female detective who (you’ve guessed it!) is also the new cop in town. Even Greer’s bitchy wedding planner, Roger, is played by Tim Bagley—whom we last saw in an almost identical role in Grace and Frankie.

This type of casting—algorithmic casting, let’s call it—is actually much older than social media. Hollywood has a long history of following up one blockbuster project with a number of similar offerings. Look no further than Meg Ryan’s (flawless) unofficial trilogy of ’90s rom-coms: When Harry Met Sally, Sleepless in Seattle, and You’ve Got Mail; or the action-packed, stunt-heavy pivot of Tom Cruise’s or Matt Damon’s career.

Jack Reynor and Dakota Fanning in The Perfect Couple

But what is new here is the way these shows and films seem crafted specifically for the social media moment. Much as with Oscar bait (films that seem like they’ve been created solely for award-season glory), projects run the risk of feeling like engagement bait if they’re too blatant about it. I first noticed this when Netflix dropped the trailer for I Care a Lot in 2021. The film stars Rosamund Pike as a scammer who takes advantage of lonely elderly people by becoming their court-appointed guardian, and then robbing them of their assets. It was impossible not to be reminded of her role as Amy Dunne in Gone Girl, a similarly manipulative villain who attempted to frame her husband for her murder. In fact, right down to Pike’s hyper-neat bob, it felt like we were supposed to be reminded of Gone Girl. That was the point. I ended up disappointed when I Care a Lot wasn’t half as smart as Gone Girl. (Because, really, how could it be?)

There seems to be an at least subconscious awareness of this online, where casting has become a meme in itself. When rumors about the cast for Glass Onion started to emerge, it seemed like there was barely an A-lister who wasn’t appearing in the 2022 Knives Out sequel. This spawned countless memes about fantasy castings. Something similar happened with the all-star Barbie movie and The White Lotus. (“Send her to the White Lotus!” has become a shorthand for actresses whom fans love the most when they’re being a little bit evil.) Journalist Michael Baumann calls this fan casting. In response to the memes about Glass Onion, he wrote about how casting news has gone from an insider topic for industry publications to a subject of fanfare on social media. “Everyone has some dream combination of cast and story,” he wrote. “Maybe the movie in your head canon will never get made, but finding out that [Edward] Norton and [Janelle] Monáe will share a screen with Benoit Blanc scratches some of that itch.”

I’ve definitely participated in these memes (and I’m also running an unofficial campaign to force series creator Mike White to cast Allison Williams in The White Lotus). But even so, there is still something about it that irks me. A few years back, I noticed that some TV shows seemed to be increasingly geared toward “memeable” moments at the expense of plot. The second season of Big Little Lies, for example, seemed to become a parody of itself, from Laura Dern snarling “I will not not be rich!” to Meryl Streep’s guttural screaming at the dinner table. Casting that feels overly predictable (and, crucially, shareable) conveys a similar sense that decision-makers are being led by their audience, rather than having the confidence to take fans to unexpected and challenging places.

Meghan Fahy in The Perfect Couple

Giving viewers more of what they’re accustomed to might seem harmless, but I worry that this sort of typecasting via algorithm will end with actors being pigeonholed into certain roles. Traditionally, typecasting has disproportionately affected women and people of color. Jennifer Lopez, for example, has spoken in the past about being typecast because of her ethnicity, and Katherine Heigl has also discussed her difficulty branching out beyond rom-coms. (Not everyone gets to be Robert De Niro or Adam Sandler, flitting between terrible and prestige projects.) In The Perfect Couple, Greer finds herself creatively unfulfilled, churning out barely different versions of the same novel to fans who lap the books up despite the declining quality. It’s hard not to notice the parallels with Kidman herself,once again playing a woman with dark secrets who is, to quote her flamboyant event planner: “kill-somebody-and-get-away-with-it rich.” (Thankfully her next project, A24’s erotic thriller Babygirl, seems more challenging.)

In the opening credits of The Perfect Couple, the characters put on a flash mob performance on the beach, set to “Criminal” by Meghan Trainor. “Anything that feels this good,” Trainor sings as they dance in formation. “Well, it must be illegal / It must be illegal.” That is sort of how it feels to click “next episode” a show like this, which seems to have been made to be turned into #content by Very Online people for a week, before disappearing forever. It’s similar to those little things we all do sometimes, like getting a delivery driver from an app to bring us something we could have sourced ourselves, or bribing a toddler in exchange for a few moments of silence. The short-term benefits are just too irresistible, whatever the wider effects.

The antidote to this anxiety is art that is so good, or surprising, that it exceeds our expectations. Like Challengers, the sexy tennis movie that was so much more, starring Zendaya, Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist. From the outside, it seemed like fairly brazen engagement bait, but Challengers ended up becoming one of the standout films of the year so far. Crucially, it proved that a memeable social media moment is actually different from a genuine cultural moment, which holds our attention for longer, harnessing art’s power to make us think differently about people, relationships, and the complex task of navigating the world.

In comparison, maybe the problem with The Perfect Couple is that, while there’s nothing wrong with being an unashamedly “pretty good” show, it is disappointing when a project doesn’t live up to the promise of its cast. The Kidman-Fanning-Fahy trifecta deserved more. This series will almost certainly top Netflix’s charts for a week or so. There will be memes, too, until the next shiny thing comes along. But it wasn’t quite good enough to distract me from the fact that, too often, we’re being spoon-fed.

Louis Staples is a freelance culture writer and critic based in London, UK. He writes “Cultural Staples” — a fortnightly culture essay at Bazaar.com. His work is featured in The Cut, The Guardian, Vogue, Rolling Stone, and Variety.