4 hours ago
9
You can’t say Imperfect Women doesn’t warn you. It is clear from the very first shots – three women dancing, drunkenly but happily, laughing but not scream-laughing, as the camera whirls round their beautifully lit selves – and the first line – an earnest voiceover about “a kinship from deep in our souls” – what we’re in for. That is, an overwritten, far-fetched, glossy but derivative murder mystery – a descendant of Big Little Lies, intermarried with touches of everything else Nicole Kidman has done in the last 10 years.
Adjust your expectations accordingly and you’ll have a perfectly acceptable eight hours of entertainment. Dwell on the fact that you could well have expected better of an Apple TV production and a main cast that includes Kerry Washington, Elisabeth Moss and Kate Mara and you’ll have less of a good time. So don’t do that.
Enjoy instead the comforts of familiarity. We open, à la Big Little Lies, in the middle of a police interview after one of the dancing women has been murdered. But who? Kerry Washington – playing an intergenerationally wealthy philanthropist, Eleanor – is the one being interviewed, so it’s not her. It’s … Kate Mara, AKA Nancy, the trophy wife of an intergenerationally wealthy non-philanthropist, Robert (Joel Kinnaman).
As a rich, short-tempered man who likes a drink and has a horrible, rapacious family that immediately hires a crisis-management firm to control the press narrative, Robert is first on the list of suspects for the police – and last on the list for viewers, because we know how these things work. But then we remember The Undoing, roll our eyes and brace for non-impact.
Moss rounds out the trio by playing Mary, a stay-at-home mum who is married to Howard (Corey Stoll), an English professor. UK audiences will need to be told, as it is not obvious from their enormous home or three immaculately turned-out children, that this means they are poor. Similarly, Nancy’s upbringing in Bakersfield, California, means she has made very good indeed. When a plot is based in US economics, the series really should come with a leaflet giving conversion tables.
So, Nancy dead. Friends upset. Friends more upset when they learn Nancy had been keeping secrets from them and they had been keeping secrets from each other – some better than others. Eleanor’s enormous crush on Robert, for example, is not quite the unknown unknown she thought it was. (Mary calls it her “connection with” him, because she is not only poor but polite.)
But Mary didn’t know that Nancy was having an affair with someone called David. Nancy told only Eleanor. So only Eleanor knew that she went to see him after their night out together, which then became the night she died. Welcome to suspect slot No 2, David.
Or is the killer in fact Davide (Theo Bongani Ndyalvane), an artist who recently painted Nancy’s naked form and whose resulting painting she even more recently hung in the marital home? Peut-être. Mais peut-être pas.
Robert takes Eleanor to the opera on his dead wife’s ticket to take their minds off things: “To hell with the optics.” OK. None of this is looking much like friendship, never mind kinship, but it is not the kind of drama that demands that you care about anything, never mind consistency or credible character development, so tra-la-la, her frock looks nice.
Mary, meanwhile, is busy securing police reports and investigating the case against Davide. She finds it unconvincing. More suspects, please!
Forth they duly come, along with more clues, more secrets, more revelations, more writing swinging from platitude to platitude (“Staying available to love is worth the risk.” “Sometimes I think you see my life more clearly than I do.” “Nothing made her happier than being your mom,” and so on).
Different episodes are seen through different eyes. The first couple are from Eleanor’s point of view, then we get Mary’s turn in the spotlight, before it is Nancy’s time to shine. It adds a layer of interest to the formula – and Moss in particular brings much to her portion – but it doesn’t disguise the thin gruel beneath.
There are occasional gestures towards larger, wider issues. Eleanor doubts Davide’s guilt partly because he is Black and she thinks Nancy would have mentioned this “to her only Black friend”, while Eleanor’s brother, Donovan – Leslie Odom Jr adding disproportionate credence to the whole via a tiny part – dislikes the fact that his sister has been holding a torch for a white man all her life. The financial differences among the friends are made plain, too. But these observations are no more than that.
Imperfect, then, definitely. But escapist fun enough.
