Netflix’s The Perfect Couple is the latest in her string of mediocre, interchangeable TV roles. What gives?

Watching The Perfect Couple, Netflix’s new soapy, six-episode whodunit starring Nicole Kidman, it’s easy to feel like you’re experiencing déjà vu. Kidman playing a wealthy mother with a slew of secrets caught up in a murder investigation in a scenic coastal location? Wait, no, that was her other show, HBO’s Big Little Lies. Kidman playing a wealthy New Yorker whose adulterous husband may or may not have committed murder? Nope, I’m thinking of her 2020 series The Undoing. Kidman playing a wealthy, well-dressed, upper-class figure with housekeeping staff and a hot husband? I’m confusing it with Expats, her Hong Kong–set show from earlier this year. Kidman playing a wealthy writer with a foreign accent inexplicably different from that of her American family? Oops, that was A Family Affair, her recent Netflix rom-com with Zac Efron.

In this latest TV outing, Kidman stars as the snooty yet chic Greer Garrison Winbury—a name so WASP-y that you can feel the letters looking down their noses at you as Greer spits out lines like, “Anyone who wears flip-flops out of the confines of their own house should be arrested.” She married into a posh New England family three decades ago, raised three sons of varying degrees of awfulness, and still found time to churn out 28 bestselling crime novels—the kind you buy last-minute at the airport in order to read on a beach vacation. But the fame and money have evidently gone to her head, because she’s obsessed with keeping up a public image of marital bliss despite some obvious tension with husband Tag Winbury (Liev Schreiber), a loafer who’s always seen with a joint in hand and who’s never had to work a day in his life.

It’s all smiles for the cameras as the couple host the marriage of their blandest child, Benji (Billy Howle), to the middle-class zookeeper Amelia (Eve Hewson, whose dark-brown hair is the first clue she’s out of place in this family). The wedding is at one of Greer and Tag’s homes, Summerland, a $40 million estate on the shores of Nantucket, the Old Money island playground off Cape Cod that boasts an airport perpetually crowded with private jets and beaches as white as the residents. The house has a mini-fridge stacked with Fiji water and a gift-wrapping room, although the maid confesses that she does most of the wrapping in her own quarters. The family is rich, we are repeatedly told—rich rich. “Child sex-ring on a private island rich,” one character tells us, or “Kill someone and get away with it rich,” another says (forebodingly!).

So when tragedy strikes and one of the wedding guests is found dead on the morning of the nuptials, long-held secrets threaten all that the family holds dear—well, you get the idea.

At its heart, The Perfect Couple wants to be The White Lotus, Mike White’s delicious skewering of the wealthy that’s wrapped in a murder mystery. (The Perfect Couple also stars Meghann Fahy, from The White Lotus Season 2, and it tries to emulate the HBO show by holding off—albeit for just one episode—on revealing who has been killed; it also copies Big Little Lies by having police interviews with side characters serve as a framing device.) But this isn’t prestige TV, it’s a soap opera, and The Perfect Couple doesn’t have characters who are remotely interesting or even developed enough for the series to be the biting satire of the rich it wants to be. It’s the kind of show where the characters get drunk at dinner (hardly anyone is ever seen without a blackberry mojito or a gin and tonic in hand) in order to confront one another Real Housewives–style, but then still somehow arise at dawn to stare mysteriously out a window. At one point as I was watching, a caption simply read “[sighing wistfully].”

To put it plainly, The Perfect Couple isn’t a particularly good show. Which prompts the question: What exactly is Kidman doing here? Why does this versatile, Academy Award–winning actor keep gravitating toward TV roles that feel so familiar, if not in their substance, then in their style and aesthetic? Some of Kidman’s TV characters are victims, some of them are villains, but most of them are glamorous, wealthy women with shitty husbands and secrets. If this time she’s playing an author of actual beach reads—that unofficial genre of frothy, easy-to-consume, low-culture romances/mysteries marketed mostly to women—it’s worth asking how and why did Kidman seemingly become the go-to actor for what can only be described as “beach TV”?

Based on a novel by the real-life “Queen of Beach Reads,” Elin Hilderbrand, The Perfect Couple is directed by Susanne Bier, who was also behind the camera for The Undoing, which was based on a novel adapted for the screen by David E. Kelley, who also wrote the script for Big Little Lies, which was based on a novel by Liane Moriarty, whose very name has been used by the New York Times as an adjective to describe beach reads. In the Beach-Read Cinematic Universe, Kidman is Madame Web: Her web connects them all.

Looking at her filmography, what’s clear is that Kidman loves to work. In the past decade alone, she’s been part of 30 or so different productions across film and television—an impressive number for an A-list star who, at this point, doesn’t really need the money. The numbers are similar for Cate Blanchett and Kate Winslet, two actors with whom I’d argue Kidman shares a lot of career DNA: non-American, Oscar-winning white female movie stars who have in recent years dabbled in television to much acclaim. For Winslet, that meant, most prominently, perfecting a Delco accent to play a gruff, beleaguered detective in Mare of Easttown and then transforming into a neurotic central European autocrat in The Regime (a show leagues behind her performance in it). Blanchett, meanwhile, portrayed the prim and cunning conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly in Mrs. America and is also starring as a documentary journalist in Alfonso Cuarón’s upcoming Apple TV+ series Disclaimer.

Kidman’s biggest TV characters, though, have more of an obvious throughline. There’s an outward elegance to them—a glamour—as if her contract stipulated that her costumes would consist entirely of designer clothing. She looks like Nicole Kidman, or at least like the A-lister we are used to seeing on red carpets. Her hair is rarely out of place (the big exception being when she donned a curly gray wig, prosthetic nose, and set of fake teeth with a gap in the center in 2017’s Top of the Lake: China Girl). Even in Hulu’s 2021 miniseries Nine Perfect Strangers, in which she played a bereaved Russian wellness guru (and which itself was also based on a novel by, who else, Moriarty), Kidman sported a lengthy blond wig and white robes, lending her an almost perpetual ethereal glow.

I’m not the only one who has noticed this fragile-housewife archetype that Kidman keeps drifting to. Writing for the Guardian about the little-watched Expats, in which Kidman played a mother grappling with the disappearance of her young son, Lucy Mangan describes the series as “the latest in a long line of prestige television dramas in which she wafts about the place as an ethereal, privileged woman haunted by a secret sorrow that all the exquisite soft furnishings and beach views in the world cannot ameliorate.” Joel Keller of Decider writes similarly in an Expats review: “Kidman feels like she’s in the phase of her career when she’s playing one depressed, wealthy, touched-by-tragedy middle aged wife and mom after another, and while her performances are always terrific, the trope has gotten old.”

That’s not to say some of these roles didn’t require some capital-A Acting from Kidman. In Big Little Lies, in particular, she won plaudits (and an Emmy) for her turn as a woman trapped in an abusive marriage. It was this show’s first season, and its enormous success, that really launched Kidman as a television actor and relaunched her in the public eye as a respected thespian after a string of mostly mediocre or forgettable movies. In a 2017 piece for BuzzFeed News titled “How Many Times Does Nicole Kidman Have to Prove Herself?” writer Anne Helen Petersen notes what she describes as an undercurrent of sexism in the idea that a performance by an Oscar-winning actress with a career spanning decades could be seen as so revelatory. “No woman with as much talent as Kidman should be forced to reargue, over and over again, that she is a force to be taken seriously,” Petersen asserts.