‘The Perfect Couple’ Landed on Fun Tone So Viewers Wouldn’t Take Murder Mystery Too Seriously — Interview
Editor’s note: This story contains spoilers for Netflix‘s “The Perfect Couple,” including the ending.
Like many, Jenna Lamia loves a murder mystery. But when it came time for her to adapt Elin Hilderbrand’s bestselling 2018 novel “The Perfect Couple” for Netflix, she landed on something a little different than what many viewers were likely expecting when they heard “Nicole Kidman” plus “dead body washes up on shore.”
“I’m still terrified about the tone,” showrunner and writer Lamia told IndieWire the day after the show premiered September 5. “I think it works. I have fun watching it, but it is a show that has to teach you how to watch it, because I think you see that it’s directed by Susanne Bier, who did “The Undoing” and “The Night Manager” so incredibly well. So you’re expecting a bit of a self-serious show. But I think when you get to the credits and everyone’s dancing to Meghan Trainor, you have to think, ‘Well, wait a minute. I think this might be a fun ride.’ I hope that that’s what those credits tell you: to sit back and relax and you can laugh, and I hope you will laugh. [But] it’s an incredibly tricky tone to pull off.”
A fan of the novel — which features Adirondack chairs on the cover and which she describes as “a vacation in book form” — Lamia knew that for a television show, they needed to up the soapiness and WTF factors to make it a glossy, bingeable watch. That meant including an added-for-TV subplot that perfectly buttoned-up Sad Rich Lady Greer (Kidman) used to work as an escort (!!). (Read about all the changes from the book to TV show.)
“I knew that I wanted Greer to have a core wound that was driving her need to appear so outwardly perfect. So that was always in the story,” Lamia explained. “But originally, I had her shamefully hiding the fact that she had plagiarized her first book; that her illustrious career was based on an initial lie. We knew we needed an initial lie, but the tone of the show had evolved to a place where that wasn’t salacious enough.”
Smash cut to an iconic Episode 6 scene where Greer gathers her children — hours into a murder investigation and fresh from the police station — to tell them that their mother used to work as an escort and in fact, that’s how she met their father. It’s a pure nighttime soap bombshell.
The other big change from the book Lamia focused on was the actual murder. In both versions of the story, Merritt (Meghann Fahy) is killed by Abby (Dakota Fanning), but in the novel, it’s an accident. On TV? Oh, it’s a murder-murder, complete with holding Merritt’s head under water until she drowned.
“In the book, you are privy to a lot of Merritt’s thoughts and her mindset when she wanders into the water to fish her ring out of the depths,” Lamia said. “And in a TV show, unless we were heavily, heavily using voiceover that wasn’t going to work or be as effective as the tone of this show needs it to be. So I realized that it may be more satisfying for the audience to find out that there was a murderer who fully intended to murder the person they murdered. … So for the show, and Elin was totally supportive of this, we decided that the killer had intended to kill the person she kills, and that she had a very clear motive for doing so, and it wasn’t just jealousy. So [we] added the money plot [where Abby wants the trust money]. It needed to be a little more crisp.”
In a show full of red herrings, as the genre demands, it was key for Lamia to leave a few clues in the six-episode miniseries so viewers wouldn’t feel like a rug was pulled out from under them.
“It’s so important to me as a viewer of murder mysteries, to feel like this was worth my time,” she said. “They’ve given me an answer, and they gave me enough that I possibly could have guessed that answer, but maybe didn’t, and maybe if I watch it again, I’ll see things I didn’t see the first time, but the feeling that the show has played fair with you was of the utmost importance to me.”
“The Perfect Couple” is now streaming on Netflix.
