Stars: Nicole Kidman, Hugh Grant, Donald Sutherland

The Lady’s Perfect Life: Kidman, is a Manhattan therapist, daughter of a doting bazillionaire (Sutherland), and wife of a shifty, twinkly eyed oncologist (Grant).

Her Problem: A toothsome but strange young Hispanic mother (Matilda de Angelis) keeps stripping down in front of her with no explanation, then turns up murdered in her conveniently red-lit Harlem studio. (She was an artist. Right. Whatever.) The Lady begins reluctantly putting it together that Something’s Wrong with her adoring, still-hot-for-her husband. Her first clue is when she finds out that he’d been fired three months before for fooling around with the gorgeous, now-dead Latina while treating her cancer-ridden kid. (Question: Do hospitals really monitor and punish doctors for this type of thing? Another question: Is there an Upper East Side household so well-off that a senior physician’s salary could go missing and not be noticed?) We begin to intuit that our Lady’s perfect life is, oh dear!, a house of cards. 

Her Key Moves: Startling and saying, “You scared me;” striding rapidly down sidewalks while frowning worriedly; ordering nothing in restaurants then asking the server for privacy; running home to Daddy.

Her Look: Embattled highland heroine – ideally pale and thin with flying red curls.

Inexplicable Absurdity: Everyone except two Hispanic characters repeatedly pronounce “Elena,” the doomed Latina’s name, as “Ellen-a.”

Crowning Ridiculousness: When the bad husband finally runs for it, The Lady’s father instantly summons a sleek helicopter in which father and daughter pursue the fleeing cad upstate where he’s threatening to jump off a bridge. You’ll never guess who talks him off the edge.

Good Bits: Sutherland and Grant are always fun to watch; the luxury apartment interiors are gorgeous; Kidman’s fitted long green coat is the bomb. The woman can really wear clothes.

The Stars: Nicole Kidman, Liev Schrieber, Eve Hewson, Dakota Fanning

The Lady’s Perfect Life: Kidman plays a best-selling writer with a fabulous, People-magazine-ready beach mansion in Nantucket. Her second son is getting married on-site, an occasion our snooty, control-freak heroine can manage with her left hand.

Her Problem: Kidman’s beautifully curated life with her slacker rich-boy husband (Schreiber) and three worthless grown sons is complicated by certain aspects of the wedding – she doesn’t care much for the sweet young bride-to-be (Hewson) or her family, or her friends. But that irritation fades in importance when the wedding is derailed by the murder of a toothsome young bridesmaid (Meghann Fahy) who’s prone to wearing bikini cover-ups in lieu of evening dresses. 

Key Moves: Commanding the servants; sniping at new-money people; impromptu afternoon sex with her ever-randy husband. (Enduring marital lust is a big part of Perfect Couple-ness.)

Her Look: Pussy bows, trailing silk and cashmere; bulky blonde wigs with a 60’s Breck Girl vibe.

Inexplicable Absurdity: Isabelle Adjani, a once-great movie beauty now pushing 70, turns up as a family friend and the adulterous love-interest of the eldest son, a charmless crypto bro forty years her junior. With her heavy black bangs, botox-frozen pallor, and enveloping caftans, Adjani resembles nothing so much as No-Face in Spirited Away. Her stylized dalliance with her young boytoy, apparently meant to encourage the older female viewer, is unbelievable at even the most soap-operatic level. 

Crowning Ridiculousness: At the very end, in a coda scene lifted straight from The Devil Wears Prada, the Lady and the former bride-to-be are shown to really understand and respect one another. No one with ovaries is a total pain in the ass, you see.

Good Bits: Nantucket; the fun the cast seems to be having there; the opening dance sequence.

Stars: Cate Blanchett, Kevin Kline, Lesley Manville, Sacha Baron Cohen

The Lady’s Perfect Life: We meet our heroine, attended by her adoring if nebbishy husband (Cohen) at a banquet in London where she’s getting a big award for her documentary filmmaking. 

Her Problem: Her fragile, twenty-something son hates her, and she harbors a Big Secret about a drowning she witnessed during an Italian beach vacation years twenty before. That secret is about to be revealed in a soft-porn roman á clef written by the recently deceased, grief-crazed mother (Manville) of the drowned young man. Oh, and he was an avid photographer who’d taken a series of naughty bedroom shots of our Lady in her underwear during their brief encounter. Now the dead woman’s doubly grieving widower (Kline) is out to exact a terrible revenge, photos in hand.

Key Move: Running around wet, gray London in a panic, scuttling her career and relationships as she tries to counteract the effects of the dead woman’s account of the drowning and surrounding events.

Her Look: Casual but expensive boho elegance, echoing Blanchett’s wardrobe in the somewhat similar but much better 2006 film, Notes on a Scandal. Note: Her hair seems to be her own. This alone puts her miles ahead of Kidman in the blondeness sweepstakes.

Inexplicable Absurdity: Lesley Manville, who does raw, moving work here as the avenging mom, is gotten up in dowdy looks from the 1950s. It’s not enough that she’s heartbroken, obsessed, middle-class, and cancer-ridden – she has to wear the late Queen’s castoffs, as well.

Crowning Ridiculousness: The point of the artfully shot but glacial narrative is that it matters who tells a story – this, the message of the concluding song of Hamilton, has become popular narrative wisdom in the years since that show hit. The great Alfonso Cuarón, who adapted and directed Disclaimer (and who, for some reason, doesn’t trust his tremendous cast to tell the story without a solemn coating of voiceover) has defended the series’ structure by pointing to this truism.

The problem with this is that the self-exonerating, “true” version of events that the Lady recounts to her tormentor in the last episode is actually less plausible than the grieving mother’s deranged reconstruction. Instead of a hot tryst, in the Lady’s telling the night of torrid sex with the dead young man was in fact a horrendous ordeal, a brutal rape followed by coerced playacting for his camera. Ick, but okay – this does explain the photos.

But then why, the next morning, instead of going to the police or getting on the first plane home, did she take her four-year-old son back down to the beach where she met her rapist and where he is still lounging about, whereupon she falls asleep, leaving the kid free to paddle out into the surf? And why does her rapist make a heroic attempt to save the child, dying in the process?

None of it computes. At all. Is the real moral not that women should be able to control their own stories, but that all women are unreliable narrators? Not to mention complete dipshits.

In the Same Vein, But Less Coherent

Little Fires Everywhere (2020), Lady in the Lake (2024):

The unintentional moral of these shows is that trying to mix any consideration of race and class into rich-lady narratives just muddies the anxiety-filled waters.

The Lady and her worries leave no room for any world we know.