Yahoo News We Need to Discuss the Perfectly Ridiculous Ending to 'The Perfect Couple'
Spoilers below for The Perfect Couple TV series and book.
In what turned out to be an inspired choice, The Perfect Couple showrunner and writer Jenna Lamia committed what Elin Hilderbrand’s most devoted readers might consider sacrilege: She took the ending to Hilderbrand’s book and slashed a solid red line through it. The finale episode of the Netflix adaptation—starring Nicole Kidman, Eve Hewson, and Dakota Fanning, among others—bears little resemblance to the final pages of Hilderbrand’s 2018 novel, and that’s to the series’ benefit. The book features an accidental murder; the series’ murder is ludicrously, viciously intentional. This switch-up was apparently decided in Lamia’s earliest meetings with producers Gail Berman and Hend Baghdady. Per Netflix’s Tudum, they “all agreed right then and there [that] there needed to be a murderer, and there needed to be a motive for that murder.”
In both Hilderbrand’s original story and the Netflix series, a young bride (named Celeste in the book, Amelia in the show) wakes up on the morning of her wedding to discover her maid of honor, Merritt Monaco, has drowned along the coast of Nantucket Island. A thorough investigation takes place, and in the book, the death is deemed an accident. At the lavish home of mystery novelist Greer Winbury and her husband, Tag, the pregnant Abby Winbury, wife of Thomas Winbury, slips a barbiturate into a water glass intended for her husband’s mistress. (She hopes the sleeping pill will prevent this mistress from having sex with Thomas that night.) Instead, the glass winds up in the hands of Merritt Monaco, and after accidentally drinking the pill-laced water, Merritt walks out to the beach and drowns. The novel ends with tragedy, the doomed (and also pregnant) Merritt contemplating her lost love affair with Tag, Celeste’s would-be father-in-law.
In the show, many of these relationship dynamics remain the same: Merritt (Meghann Fahy) is having an affair with the much-older Tag (Liev Schreiber); Thomas (Jack Reynor) is cheating on his wife, Abby (Fanning); Abby and Merritt (Fahy) are both pregnant; and Amelia (Hewson) is caught in the web of all their wandering eyes. But money proves a much more powerful playing card in the adaptation than in the book. As Abby, Fanning is ruthless and manipulative, her greed barely kept at bay by her stolen wedding gifts and hair appointments with Sally Hershberger. She has a reason for the white-knuckled grip she keeps on her elevated status in the Winbury family. As she tells detective Nikki Henry (Donna Lynne Champlin) in an early episode, her parents had some money, but nothing like what the Winburys possess. She basks in their wealth, eager to prove it’s her natural habitat; she caresses her pregnant stomach as she dresses precisely to Greer’s color palette of pinks and yellows and blues.
But when she learns Merritt is secretly pregnant with Tag’s child—a Winbury child—Abby’s position is put at risk. Thomas is not doing well at work, he’s in a dangerous amount of debt, he’s sleeping around, and he can’t seem to convince his father to extend him a loan. That shouldn’t be such a problem, given that the three Winbury sons (Thomas, Benji, and Will) are each awaiting a significant inheritance once Will turns 18, mere weeks after Amelia and Benji’s pending nuptials. But if Tag has another child, the inheritance will have to wait until that Winbury baby turns 18—plus the money would then be split between four kids rather than three.
Abby isn’t having any of that nonsense. In a twist so wild it actually works, Abby decides to eliminate the fourth Winbury offspring by literally drowning Merritt. Nor does she find it particularly strenuous. Fond of recreational drugs, Thomas has already stolen a pill from Amelia’s mother, Karen, who has terminal cancer. Abby discovers this pill stored in Thomas’s nightstand, and she mixes it into a glass of orange juice that she then delivers to a weeping Merritt on the beach. Like so many of Abby’s back-handed behaviors, her politeness masks her hunger. When they decide to go for a swim together, Merritt begins to slip into unconsciousness, and Abby forces the MOH’s head underwater until Merritt’s body goes still. Fanning, in her frilly pink sundress, is paradoxically vicious. Unlike Amelia or Merritt, Abby grew up close enough to Winbury-like wealth to be aware of its existence, then lured and locked into its orbit. In other words: She knew just enough to want it, whatever the cost.
That motive—however ridiculous the action it begets—is a lot more satisfying than a tragic accident would have been. That accident works in Hilderbrand’s book; it drives home the idea that women are often collateral damage in the tidal wave of men’s appetites, and that no couple can realistically claim perfection. But in the TV series, the satisfaction of watching a rich posturer like Abby get her comeuppance proves more powerful in a visual medium. As she screeches in protest, not even the Winbury progeny she carries can ward off the handcuffs.
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