Like joyriding into the suborbit while millions face evictions and homelessness amid a pandemic, the premise of the new Hulu drama “Nine Perfect Strangers” is proudly, if not defiantly, out of touch.
Adapted from “Big Little Lies” author Liane Moriarty’s 2018 novel, the ensemble mystery finds nine guests at a high-end retreat under the thrall of a statuesque, white-clad guru Masha (Nicole Kidman) with murky motivations and a shady biography. The current moment of eat-the-rich populism and please-shove-your-jade-egg-anywhere-else wellness skepticism was deftly captured by another show set at a sanctuary from the 99 percent, Mike White’s just-concluded “The White Lotus” on HBO. But with “Nine Perfect Strangers,” we’re asked to empathize with best-selling authors, former football players and straight-up lottery winners, as well as take seriously the possibility that a one-size-fits-all remedy will make almost anyone feel better, no matter their struggles, at least for a little while.
Being behind the cultural curve doesn’t necessarily make for a subpar series. But “Nine Perfect Strangers” certainly suffers from its proximity to “The White Lotus,” which boasts not just auteurial vision and narrative urgency but also, uh, character revelations that make sense, actors who seem to inhabit the same universe and romantic pairings with more sexual chemistry than you’d find between a pair of flip flops.
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“Nine Perfect Strangers” isn’t the worst show I’ve seen this year, even if it often felt like it. (The actual worst is probably Amazon’s “Solos,” the star-studded, monologue-laden “Black Mirror” wannabe.) But it’s probably the series with the biggest gap between what its creators, John Henry Butterworth and the legendary but highly uneven David E. Kelley (“Big Little Lies”), probably intended and what it ended up being.
Pulling up to Tranquillum in the most evident distress is Frances (Melissa McCarthy), a romance author predictably unlucky in love. Already reeling from a breakup, Frances gets some bad news about her latest book right before she enters the spa and has her phone confiscated by one of the two main wellness “consultants,” Yao (Manny Jacinto) and Delilah (Tiffany Boone). If there’s any tension the consultants feel as service workers paid to boss around their deep-pocketed customers, “Nine Perfect Strangers” is too economically blinkered to address it, at least in the first six of eight episodes (the ones screened for press). Despite Yao and Delilah being fairly prominent characters, we never get a firm sense of how they feel about their clients, either as individuals or as a group.
The biggest surprise of “Nine Perfect Strangers” is that Tranquillum’s guests are in genuine pain, that these aren’t a bunch of Richie Riches who gave themselves affluenza out of cosseted boredom. Frances’s last relationship was no typical bad romance, for example, and there’s a tragic reason her rough-hewed love interest (Bobby Cannavale) seems to be short-tempered all the time. A middle-aged couple (Michael Shannon and Asher Keddie) and their 20-year-old daughter (Grace Van Patten), the only customers granted a discount by Kidman’s Masha, are slowly imploding after a death in the family. A glamorous influencer (Samara Weaving) and her disapproving husband (Melvin Gregg) flail around a marital dissatisfaction they can’t name. The best adjusted among them appears to be friendly, normal Carmel (Regina Hall), who wants to lose some weight, get over her divorce, become a better person, maybe even change the world — really, whatever Masha wants her to do.
The ninth guest, Lars (Luke Evans) is the most jaded, describing Tranquillum — for all its hot springs, bamboo groves, cliffside rivers and glass-walled accommodations — as “just another construct to separate rich people from their money [and] get them to feel good about themselves in the process.” He’s there to expose Masha, though what there is to expose, he isn’t sure yet.
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The series’ raison d’etre is its reveals: what the characters divulge about their histories and what Masha is doing to them without their knowledge. Unfortunately, nearly every one of these reveals is gimmicky, uninteresting or both; the effect is less a melting of hearts than the click of puzzle pieces falling into place. (And yet, it’s difficult not to notice that the characters of color are even more underwritten than their White counterparts.) Jonathan Levine, who directed the entire series, evidently took more care in conveying the psychedelic wooziness of smoothies swirling in slow motion than in establishing a unified world. The cast’s performances belong to different productions, ranging from McCarthy’s broad pugnacity to Keddie’s hushed verisimilitude.
But no performance is as disappointing as Kidman’s, which fails to conjure the elusiveness and evasiveness that define Masha. In a waist-long, ice-blonde wig that looks to belong to a particularly miserly “Lord of the Rings” LARPer, Kidman, as the perceptive, authoritative, compassionate-to-a-point Masha, fails to replicate the electrifying inscrutability that Holly Hunter brought to her wrathful sage in “Top of the Lake,” an obvious analogue. Kidman’s no less an actress, but her unlined face is even more immobile than usual here; in a crying scene, alarmingly little of it stirs. And though the series was shot in Australia, Kidman attempts a Russian accent that changes shape as often as fire.
Surveilling her guests through omnipresent cameras and altering their sense of reality without their consent, Masha’s a megalomaniac who can’t help playing god when given the chance. But she feels increasingly generic as the series chugs along, flattening from a female Keith Raniere to a life-size cardboard cutout of him.
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But if you’re in “White Lotus” withdrawal mode, you’re in luck. There are few TV hours more enjoyably spent than on another tropics-set Mike White project: his twisty, insightful, actually fun season as a competitor on “Survivor.”
Nine Perfect Strangers premieres Wednesday on Hulu. New episodes stream weekly.
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