The trouble with any new Netflix show is it can be hard to know what you’re signing up for. Take The Perfect Couple. It stars Nicole Kidman and Liev Schreiber. It’s got murder. It’s about a wealthy family. But what kind of Nicole Kidman show is this? Is this “Actually, this is serious,” like Expats, or is it a Big Little Lies melodrama? Maybe it’s more of a Nine Perfect Strangers prime-time-soap feel?
One way to suss that out is to examine the opening credits, because a TV show’s opening-credits sequence sets the tone. And in the case of The Perfect Couple, what the opening credits seem to imply is that someone had a head injury. Or consumed a hallucinogen? Or is a frustrated choreographer who somehow got the gig as opening-credits coordinator for this Netflix show and just brought the tools they had? Or just wanted to have fun!
To set the scene: In the premiere of The Perfect Couple, which is called “Happy Wedding Eve,” the first scenes establish a beautiful Nantucket beach setting. Whales breach the blue ocean waters. In a gorgeous tent outside a stunning coastal home, Kidman, a.k.a. Greer Garrison Winbury, embraces her three sons. Guests at a rehearsal dinner sip Champagne while carefully articulating expository and/or foreboding dialogue like “Maid of honor, at your service!” and “I love this woman to death! You get that? To death.” Then there are establishing shots of police tape and evidence markers on the beach. Someone says, “No one’s getting married today. Somebody died.” Someone else says, “Oh, they’re rich. Child-sex-ring-on-a-private-island rich. ‘I’m bored — let’s go buy a monkey’ rich. Kill-someone-and-get-away-with-it rich.”
In other words, this murder show is gonna be a good time! We’re all going to have so much fun figuring out who did it! This is not one of those dour, important ones. This is a gas! But what if no one gets it? What if Kidman’s painfully straight performance and Schreiber’s grimace insinuating he’s being held there under duress do not adequately communicate how fun this show is? Cue the opening-credits dance choreography!
To the tune of Meghan Trainor’s “Criminals” (key lyric: “Lock me up ’cause I’ve been bad / And I know I’ll do it again”), a drone shot presents the entire cast on the beach, arrayed in rows in front of that very same rehearsal-dinner tent. They are in their rehearsal-dinner costumes. They do not wear shoes. They are performing a choreographed dance featuring moves like “arms raised over your head,” “clap and then slide,” and “turn to the side while pointing at the sky.”
Meghann Fahy and Dakota Fanning are either legitimately enjoying themselves or more than capable of pretending this is, in fact, a delightful lark. Most of the other participants are at least game, trying their best to look as though this is a great idea and that, by the way, they feel perfectly comfortable with this group dance number as the gateway tone-setter to a Nantucket murder show. Consider Irina Dubova, for instance, who plays the maid standing behind Fahy. That’s a team player right there. That’s someone who has taken direction, someone who may have their doubts about this endeavor but who is here to do a job and do that job well.
Kidman’s approach, meanwhile, is ethereal dissociation. She’s here. She’s obviously the center of this whole thing. But she is an absent center, presenting a calm and Zen-like placidity that communicates utter confidence in oneself while simultaneously suggesting she is on an interior sabbatical. Is she dedicating total commitment to the character of Greer Garrison Winbury, wealthy novelist whose marriage is falling apart? Or perhaps she’s on a Thanos-esque mission to collect lead maternal roles in a series for each and every streaming platform — and once she does, she can ascend to a higher plane of being?
Then there’s Schreiber. This may look easy, and you might assume that anyone could pull off this facial expression. No, no, no! It is hard to look this focused while filming a group dance number on a beach for the opening-credits sequence of a show about a gruesome crime. It takes effort and concentration. This man is a professional, and he is going to nail it. You may not like it, but this is what peak performance looks like.
The Perfect Couple is not breaking brand-new ground here. Pachinko, the heartbreaking and lovely Apple TV+ show about multigenerational trauma in a Korean family, also uses a dance sequence for its intro. In that case, the dance is a defiant and glorious expression of exuberant joyfulness, a metafictional frame that offers a moment of relief and celebration for characters whose fictional arcs are often shaped by pain. As Pachinko’s actors look directly into the camera, situated in a liminal space both in and out of the fiction, they offer a bond of shared experience with the viewer, a simultaneous acknowledgment and reprieve.
The Perfect Couple is doing the same thing when you think about it. It’s murder … but it’s also dance. The dance of life and death. It’s a beach-read TV show, and everyone has permission to let loose. Just ask Liev Schreiber.
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