NINE PERFECT STRANGERS (Jonathan Levine). Premieres Friday (August 20) on Amazon Prime Video Canada, with new episodes available to stream weekly. Rating: NNNN
If finishing The White Lotus left you craving a new limited series about a bunch of people gathered at a photogenic-as-hell resort, Nine Perfect Strangers might be just what you’re looking for. It’s not as pointedly satirical as Mike White’s HBO series, which aired its season finale Sunday, but that’s okay: It’s chasing a different vibe entirely.
A reunion of sorts for Big Little Lies writer/producer David E. Kelley and star Nicole Kidman, who are adapting another Liane Moriarty novel about cryptic gatherings, casual sniping and closely guarded secrets, Nine Perfect Strangers is set almost entirely at an exclusive California wellness retreat attended by the eponymous folks, played by Melissa McCarthy, Michael Shannon, Bobby Cannavale, Regina Hall, Samara Weaving, Melvin Gregg, Luke Evans, Asher Keddie and Grace Van Patten.
There, Kidman’s enigmatic guru and her eerily composed associates (Manny Jacinto, Tiffany Boone) offer to completely reinvent them in 10 days’ time… through methods which are as radical as they are risky.
Those looking to recapture the sharp edges and overlapping domestic issues of Big Little Lies might find new show to be a little off-putting; Nine Perfect Strangers shares its predecessor’s careful attention to detail and appreciation of idiosyncratic performances, but this one has something much wilder and sadder going on underneath.
Series director Jonathan Levine – whose films 50/50 and Long Shot are both character comedies with undercurrents of richer, more complicated lives – is ready and willing to puncture the weight of assorted traumas with a goofy dream sequence or an unexpected serenade. Every episode contains comic and dramatic elements, and moves between them without warning. There’s a reason for everything that happens, but Nine Perfect Strangers encourages us to share its characters’ disorientation as the story unfolds.
Every member of the cast is up for whatever they’re asked to do: McCarthy and Cannavale have a spiky, endearing arc as broken people who hate each other on sight, Hall’s nervous divorcée is a symphony of despair and insecurity and Evans is a delight as a boundary-free Welshman. Samara Weaving, of Ready Or Not and Bill & Ted Face The Music, is both very funny and piercingly sympathetic as a wannabe influencer who’s grown distant from her mega-rich husband (Gregg).
But it’s Shannon, Keddie and Van Patten who have the most compelling storyline as a suburban family shattered by a recent loss, and who’ll do almost anything to make it go away. All three actors are perfectly cast as a family unit that hasn’t yet figured out a way to restabilize itself. And there’s something close to genius in watching the volatile Shannon play an ordinary suburban dad: his natural intensity can’t help but makes his character come off as someone desperately trying to appear normal, and struggling to hold himself together. Which is, as it turns out, exactly who this guy is.
One small caveat: Amazon only provided the first six episodes of Nine Perfect Strangers for review, and episode six ends with a hell of a cliffhanger. I haven’t read Moriarty’s book, so I have no idea whether the plot is moving in the same direction, or how it’ll all be resolved. But I am very, very invested in finishing this show, and I’m really eager to see how it plays for everyone else.
