The Perfect Couple showrunner Jenna Lamia explains the show’s surprise murderer reveal and its deviation from Elin Hilderbrand’s novel. Released on Netflix earlier this month, the murder mystery series chronicles the lavish wedding between Amelia Sacks (Eve Hewson) and Benji Winbury (Billy Howle), and how it falls apart when the maid of honor, Merritt Monaco (Meghann Fahy), washes up dead on the beach. Also starring Nicole Kidman and Liev Schreiber, The Perfect Couple ends with the surprise reveal that Abby Winbury (Dakota Fanning) intentionally killed Merritt, a deviation from the novel in which she does it accidentally.

In a recent interview with IndieWire, Lamia goes deep on The Perfect Couple‘s ending, explaining why they made Abby’s killing of Merritt intentional instead of the result of an accident. According to the showrunner, the change in medium from book to television necessitated the change, as a novel is better able to flesh out the inner thoughts of the characters. In the end, Lamia says that she believes making the murder intentional makes the story “more satisfying for the audience.” Read her full comment below:

“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. 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.”

What The Perfect Couple’s Ending Means For The Show

How The Netflix Series Has Been Received

Image via Netflix

The Perfect Couple‘s reviews have been generally positive from critics, if not somewhat lukewarm. The Netflix murder mystery series has, as of writing, a 60% critics’ score on Rotten Tomatoes. The audience score, now called the Popcornmeter, comes in higher at 69%. Generally speaking, then, it seems as Lamia’s construction of the narrative and the ending are proving popular and making for a compelling season of television.

Lamia’s comments highlight a broader problem when it comes to adapting novels into movies or television, which is that the novel format allows authors to more easily present characters’ interior lives. In a TV show, revealing a character’s inner thoughts is often most easily done with voice over, but this isn’t a technique that always makes sense tonally or stylistically. The series’ final moments put a fairly neat bow on the story, meaning any potential The Perfect Couple season 2 could take the approach that Hilderbrand takes with her novels, which is to tell another Nantucket-set story.

Our Take On The Perfect Couple’s Ending

Lamia Made The Right Choice With Abby

There may be a little more nuance to the ending of Hilderbrand’s novel, but The Perfect Couple‘s characters still get a compelling ending in the series. The storytelling gymnastics it would take to present the narrative exactly as it happens in the book would probably bog the story down and ultimately make for a less coherent and streamlined viewer experience. It remains to be seen whether The Perfect Couple season 2 will move forward, but Lamia has evidently proven herself a strong choice to adapt additional Hilderbrand novels.