The Netflix adaptation of The Perfect Couple , one of Elin Hilderbrand’s wildly popular beach reads , treats its source material extremely liberally. The basics of both plots are the same: The maid of honor at the wedding of a wealthy Nantucket family turns up dead on the morning of the ceremony, then everyone becomes a suspect. But the streaming version developed by showrunner Jenna Lamia and directed by Susanne Bier unfurls way more freak flags — see: Tag Winbury’s drunken performance of Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up” at his wife’s book party — than the novel dares to even imagine.
It also views the members of the Winbury family and their enormous privilege with a much more blatantly cynical eye, which is directly reflected in the resolution of the murder of that maid of honor, Merritt Monaco (Meghann Fahy). Hilderbrand’s version of this story takes its time to absolve every single rich person who could have contributed to Merritt’s demise, including the person most responsible: Abby Winbury, the pregnant daughter-in-law of Tag and Greer Garrison Winbury. Abby, an extremely peripheral figure in the book, drops a sedative into a glass of water intended for Featherleigh Dale (yes, that is the character’s name), the British cougar who becomes French femme fatale Isabel Nallet (Isabelle Adjani) in the series.
Abby is frustrated by her husband Tom’s ongoing affair with this woman, but because no one in the book ever does anything truly dastardly,.