I moved soon after Nine Perfect Strangers arrived on Hulu in 2021. A die hard Nicole Kidman fan, I knew I’d watch the show eventually — I mean, I sat through Grace of Monaco — and this was perfect timing. I binged all eight episodes while building IKEA furniture, giving the mediocre show the exact amount of attention it deserved.
Almost four years later, this limited series has received a second season. It’s an inexplicable decision until you remember that now all TV has become IKEA TV. Even if most people aren’t putting furniture together, they are on their phones. It’s why more and more studio executives are asking screenwriters to over-explain plot points. Every story should be understandable to someone texting friends or scrolling entirely separate videos while the series plays in the background.
Long before there was so-called prestige TV, there was trash TV. There’s nothing wrong with watching soap operas. In fact, one reason I love Nicole Kidman is because she’ll do Expats (a great a show that demands full attention), The Perfect Couple (a show that does not), Babygirl (a great movie that demands full attention), and A Family Affair (a movie that does not) all in a single year.
The first season of Nine Perfect Strangers was totally sufficient trash where Kidman chewed scenery with a bad wig and a worse accent and every one of its famous cast members — likely receiving hefty paychecks — tonally seemed to be on completely different shows. Alas, the second season has held onto this tonal confusion but little of the trashy fun. It’s not a mashup of storylines in a way that feels goofy and entertaining. It’s a show that seems to have disdain for its own existence. It has the energy of an eighth season of a long-running series where everyone involved yearns to be free of their contract. But most of the cast is new and this is only a second season. If the people involved didn’t even want to work on this, why does it exist?
I don’t actually know if show creator John-Henry Butterworth and director Jonathan Levine only made this because the industry is at a point where any job feels like a miracle. But I do know that the show comments on itself in a way that implies that’s the case.
“When you keep an open mind it leaves doors open for terrible shit to come in,” one character says, only for her girlfriend to make fun of her, telling her that’s really profound and she should write it down. Later she’ll describe a dream sequence as “a very on the nose nightmare” as if to get out in front of any criticisms that the sequence was cliché. Just like the show has someone make fun of Nicole Kidman’s character for having an inconsistent accent, something said by many viewers after season one. Another character calls someone the Fresh Prince of Ryan Air, followed by someone else saying, oh that’s good how long have you been sitting on that one?
What makes the best soap operas fun is their sincerity. Even if the intention is camp, that’s better achieved by a true commitment to the characters and story you’re telling. Instead, this season of Nine Perfect Strangers is so desperate to avoid critique, it feels like every fifteen minutes the show asks us why we’re still watching.
That’s not to say it’s without its pleasures. King Princess is surprisingly good as a former child prodigy with a controlling girlfriend played by Maisie Richardson-Sellers. Her storyline and Annie Murphy’s storyline with Christine Baranski — the only actor who truly understands the show she’s on — are both committed to mommy issues in a way that will entertain queer viewers. Murray Bartlett is also enjoyable as a former kids TV host with anger issues — even if it feels like a very dark omen for the industry that Bartlett won an Emmy for The White Lotus only to end up on White Lotus-lite a few years later.
Maybe I’m being too harsh. Maybe there’s a place for bad TV that hates itself, hates its audience, and has its characters on cliché drug trips every single episode. But I think because TV is getting worse, because attention spans are dwindling, because we feel mere years away from AI-written media that will make this show appear prestige, I feel a stubborn resistance to turning off my brain. In fact, my mind is starving. I want work that’s challenging or, at least, sharp in its entertaining stupidity. I can’t subject myself to anything else that approaches a variety of serious topics with a perspective this hollow.
The good news for Nicole Kidman fans is she already has another limited series in post, yet another in production, and a third season of Big Little Lies in development. And if the industry is too dead right now to make even one of those worth watching, hey, more people could take that time to watch Expats!
Nine Perfect Strangers season two is now streaming on Hulu.
“ It’s an inexplicable decision until you remember that now all TV has become IKEA TV. ” – this is SO true of the vast majority! At least it’s let me finally watch Friday Night Lights (with a surprise lesbian mayor)….
Right I finally watched Succession lol
Speaking of IKEA TV, has anyone watched Motorheads? I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that show was written by AI. The writing is so maddeningly aimless and generic. It’s like what would happen if someone asked ChatGPT to create a teen show that’s a mashup of Fast & Furious and One Tree Hill. I watched it hoping for a queer character and it had two, but they may as well not have been queer considering how their queerness exists purely to check boxes. One of them could’ve easily been cut out of the show altogether and it wouldn’t have made any difference to the plot whatsoever. I’m so tired of bad TV. It’s frustrating because I KNOW there’s no dearth of writers who are capable of writing good stories, but it seems like no one wants to produce good television anymore, even if they have access to great talent.
I couldn’t get through the first season of this show, but I did recently watch all of Expats and desperately wish I had good stuff to read or someone to debrief with about that show. There was so much going on and so much I wasn’t sure what I thought/felt about!