Nicole Kidman in Netflix Murder Mystery

The good news about The perfect coupleThe Netflix adaptation of Elin Hilderbrand’s novel about a death during a wedding weekend is that the finale is amazing.

The pace is brisk. The resolution is satisfying — hard to guess at the time, but makes perfect sense in retrospect. And the tone strikes a devilishly funny groove as the all-star cast, finally freed from the obligation to play their characters’ cards close to their chests, launches headlong into sarcasm, cruelty, or heretofore unexplored levels of DGAF.

Unfortunately, the bad news about The perfect couple is … most of the rest. While it’s not a particularly long viewing experience, at just under six hours, the road to that ending feels so interminable that I can’t in good conscience recommend anyone make this journey just for the destination.

Plus, large parts of the series feel like rehashes of better shows you may have already seen. Billy Howle, of FX’s great Under the banner of heavenplays another man (Benji) who brings an unsuspecting, average woman into the fold of his openly disapproving, suspiciously close-knit, and ultimately toxic clan. Only this time, his family’s problem isn’t that they’re too religious, but too rich — “‘kill someone and get away with it’ rich,” according to one bystander, if not quite “kidnapped rich,” according to another.

Benji’s love interest, Amelia, is played by Eve Hewson, who should be well-versed in potentially murderous relationships thanks to her role in Apple TV+’s series. Bad sistersThe happy couple have gathered with their family in Nantucket for their wedding, which will be attended by a few more vaguely familiar characters — including Meghann Fahy as Amelia’s best friend Merritt, a tanned charmer whose enthusiasm belies a deeper sadness not unlike her Emmy-nominated role on HBO’s The White Lotus.

And then there’s the Nicole Kidman of it all. Her Greer, Benji’s mother, is another beautiful but fragile matriarch plucked from the bestseller shelves, whose seemingly perfect family begins to crack when someone is murdered and/or disappears in their expensive seaside town. It’s a role Kidman honed in HBO’s Big little liesand while Amazon’s more stylish Expats proved that she can still mine new gold from this archetype, The perfect couple feels like Kidman on autopilot. Even the revelations at the end, juicy as they are, do little to dispel that impression.

The premise is a fairly standard mystery: a body is found on the morning of Amelia and Benji’s ceremony, but the show takes a long time to reveal whose body it is. The mystery is executed in a disappointingly standard manner. The perfect coupleThe similarity to all those other series does the series no favors, because in the vast majority of the six episodes the series struggles to find its own voice.

While it can be funny, especially when it borrows from Big little lies Despite its conceit of a Greek chorus of witnesses who seem more excited about the opportunity to gossip than they are concerned about the possibility of a murderer in their midst, it’s not consistently sharp enough to work as satire. It half-heartedly pokes at larger themes about the impossibility of truly understanding a marriage or a family from the outside—the title refers to Greer and her husband, Tag (Liev Schreiber), whose idealized marriage is a major marketing element for her best-selling mystery novel series. (Yes, it’s all very meta.) But it doesn’t dig deep enough to truly reveal either of their hearts, let alone unearth new insights.

Director Susanne Bier (HBO’s The undoanother in the Kidman-as-hapless-white-lady crime canon) gives the series an award-bait sheen to match its high-profile cast. A favorite trick of hers is to zoom in very close on someone’s eye or mouth, as if asking us to think, really thinkabout what might be going on inside. But such games are a poor substitute for actual character development. Hampered by the need to keep us guessing for six whole hours, while the plot clearly cries out for the efficiency of a two-hour film, the scripts make most of the Winburys and their associates too monotonous to seem worth knowing.

A blessed minority still manages to impress. I enjoyed it Crazy ex girlfriend‘s Donna Lynne Champlin as Detective Henry, a mainlander whose easy intelligence and wry sense of humor provide a welcome contrast to the Winburys’ clueless pretensions — as does her platonic chemistry with Michael Beach’s Officer Carter, who gradually warms to this outsider. On the other hand, I was tickled by Dakota Fanning as Amelia’s future sister-in-law, Abby, a mean girl who delivers her cruelest stabs in her most honeyed tones. Though it’s fraught with mutual loathing, her marriage to Benji’s big brother Tom (Jack Reynor) — also a bully, but a much blunter and cruder one — may be the most explicable romance of the entire series.

Abby may not be a deep character, but Fanning tears her apart with an over-the-top enthusiasm that’s equal parts terrifying and hilarious. If her performance feels like it came from an entirely different show than the one Kidman spends most of her time on — honestly, I’d rather watch Fanning’s.

As it turns out, The perfect couple seems to agree with me. Towards the end of the series, a family friend (Isabelle Adjani) suggests to Amelia that there’s a reason Greer seems to hate her so much. “When people have spent their whole lives worrying about what other people say, they can’t bear to see someone…” She trails off in French before getting to the point: “It reminds them of their wasted lives.”

Too much of the series feels like it’s trying to be something it’s not: a prestige drama, an investigative character study, a classroom commentary, a poignant portrait of a family in crisis. No wonder it feels like a sigh of relief when the finale lets go of all that and embraces what it should have been all along: pure popcorn fun, with little more in mind than the desire to entertain and amuse. Too bad it feels like an eternity to get there.