The ending of “The Perfect Couple” is much more difficult than the book

Photo: COURTESY OF NETFLIX

The Netflix adaptation of The perfect coupleone of Elin Hilderbrand’s hugely popular beach novels, takes an extremely liberal approach to its source material. The basics of both plots are the same: The maid of honor of a wealthy Nantucket family is found dead on the morning of the ceremony, and everyone becomes a suspect. But the streaming version, developed by showrunner Jenna Lamia and directed by Susanne Bier, casts far more bizarre shadows—see: Tag Winbury’s drunken rendition of Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up” at his wife’s book party—than the novel even dares to imagine. It also takes a much more overtly cynical look at the members of the Winbury family and their enormous privilege, which is directly reflected in the resolution of the murder of maid of honor Merritt Monaco (Meghann Fahy).

Hilderbrand’s version of this story takes the time to absolve every single rich person who might have contributed to Merritt’s death, including the person with the most responsibility: Abby Winbury, the pregnant daughter-in-law of Tag and Greer Garrison Winbury. Abby, a very minor character in the book, slips a tranquilizer into a glass of water intended for Featherleigh Dale (yes, that’s the character’s name), the British cougar who becomes the French femme fatale Isabel Nallet (Isabelle Adjani) in the series. Abby is frustrated by her husband Tom’s ongoing affair with this woman, but since no one in the book ever does anything truly nefarious, she has no intention of killing Featherleigh. Abby just wants to knock her unconscious for a moment.

But that glass of water is instead inadvertently drunk by Merritt, who eventually dies when the drugs begin to take a toll on her body while trying to retrieve a ring – given to her by Tag, with whom she was having an affair – from the sea and drowns in the process. The police never find out what happened. No arrests are made. The only person who knows what happened is Greer. “The police ruled Merritt’s death an accident – and it was, in fact, an accident,” Hilderbrand writes. “Abby may not even realize she was to blame, and Thomas will never put two and two together. The secret is with Greer, and with Greer it will remain until she dies.”

Abby’s motive is closely tied to the theme embedded in the book’s title: that no couple is perfect because everyone hides their sins, even people like Greer and Tag or Thomas and Abby, who seem to have everything. This is even reflected in the final sentences of the novel, which describe Merritt’s final moments of life: “Where is the ring? There it is. She sees it.” Like loveshe thinks. It is simply beyond their reach.”

Lamia’s version of The perfect couple is certainly filled to the brim with adultery, but it’s much more interested in another theme: that extremely privileged people suck. The murder motive in their story is rooted in the thing that always drives people like the Winburys – money. So the Netflix series includes a major plot point that’s completely absent from the novel version, which is that the trust money owed to the Winbury sons is about to come due when the youngest, Will, turns 18 in a few weeks. The fact that Merritt is pregnant with Tag’s child, which is the case in both the book and the series, threatens to derail that plan, because that would mean everyone would have to wait 18 more years for Tag’s fourth child to grow up before they can get their money. Several Winburys and some of their associates have legitimate reasons for not wanting that child to be born, which makes for a much juicier reason to kill than the comparatively lukewarm desire to force your husband’s mistress to take a long, deep nap.

Without the internal monologues that soften readers’ impressions of the characters in Hilderbrand’s book, each member of the Winbury family comes across as an unrepentant narcissist, potentially capable of malicious behavior. Any of them could have done it. But as in the novel, it all comes down to Abby, brought to life by a terrific, slyly spiteful performance by Dakota Fanning.

In the book, Abby is portrayed as an aspiring sorority girl and the daughter of a Texas oil tycoon. Like the Winburys, she comes from a wealthy family and seems little aware of how much her social status protects her from danger. The Dakota Fanning version of Abby is much more self-aware. Although she didn’t grow up middle-class like Amelia (Eve Hewson), who is set to marry the Winburys’ son, Benji (a deliberately cryptic Billy Howle), her lilies aren’t nearly as shiny as the Winburys’. She’s enough of an upper-class outsider to come across as a wannabe—constantly craving her mother-in-law’s praise—and to believably poke fun at all the wealth around her. “Jesus, it looks like Lily Pulitzer puked all over this place,” she drawls as she enters Greer’s book party. But her life of luxury is so important to her – and she wants her husband to get the money he owes her – that she would do anything to maintain it. As it turns out, including murder.

In the TV version of A perfect couplethere are no accidents. As we learn in the finale, Abby knew exactly what she was doing when she slipped a barbiturate into a glass of cold-pressed orange juice that she handed to Merritt, who sat despondently on the beach, her foot bleeding from stepping on glass. “If you want something done right,” she says somberly as Merritt gulps down her glass of citrus poison, “you have to do it yourself.” Abby suggests a bath; when Merritt begins to lose control of her senses, Abby submerges her head under the water and holds it there until the expectant mother, threatening to delay her husband’s inheritance, can no longer breathe.

The book never comes anywhere close to this cruelty – it doesn’t have the stomach for it. Nor does it have the sense of drama that would be required to actually hold one of its main characters accountable. This is not a problem for the Netflix series! In one of the most satisfying moments in The perfect couplethe police show up at the Winburys’ estate to arrest Abby for Merritt’s murder, and she does what any spoiled brat does when faced with the responsibility of her actions: She tries to get out of it. “I’m pregnant,” she says haughtily, as if the police can’t arrest a woman when she’s nearing her third trimester. It’s an especially clever line because of its subtext: Abby thinks she’s protected by having some real Winbury blood in her body. But she’s not. Really one of them. She’s just a messenger, an expendable person who is deliberately dragged off the property and screams at the top of her lungs when told she has the right to remain silent.

Through Abby’s arrest, Lamia and her co-writers allow audiences the satisfaction of seeing something we rarely see in real life: a one percenter receiving 100 percent of the punishment they deserve. But like the book, this iteration of The perfect coupleThis keeps the rest of the Winburys out of trouble. After Abby’s arrest, it’s as if no one notices she’s gone. Tag literally doesn’t notice; he’s so focused on hitting seagulls with a golf ball that he misses the entire incident.

In both versions of this story, the Winburys—Tag, Greer, Tom, Benji, and, in the Netflix series, Will, who doesn’t exist in the book—are seemingly able to move on with their lives unscathed after the whole messy Merritt incident. This feels appropriate and true to what could happen in real life. In the series, Greer even gets a last-minute image makeover thanks to her revelation that earlier in her life she was so penniless that she worked as an escort. In the final scene, she tries to reconnect with Amelia, who ultimately doesn’t marry Benji, in a way that suggests Greer “understands” Amelia because she didn’t grow up wealthy either.

But Greer is too entrenched in her luxury environment to really remember what it feels like to have very little. She will always be more than fine in life, and so will her children. Hilderbrand understands that, and so does the ending of her book. Lamia’s ending understands that, too, but it also understands that in a crime thriller, especially when it’s about incredibly rich, short-sighted people, the audience needs to see someone held accountable, and all the better if it’s a conceited snob screaming at her husband to call her lawyer while she’s handcuffed. On paper, that might have seemed too extreme. But in the Netflix version of The perfect coupleit has just the right amount of juice.