It's a sad truth (all right, I don't find it that sad) that it's easier to trash something than to gush over it. And so, once more following the path of least resistance, I forgo the chance to praise the unexpected enjoyability of the film Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves in favour of sinking my teeth into the Netflix mini-series The Perfect Couple.
Reviews of this whodunnit story, set in and around the idyllic coastal residence of an ultra-rich family, have good-naturedly described it as entertaining trash. If I remember correctly, one review even called it the modern equivalent of Lace. For my part, I didn't think it can hold a candle to the giddy slice of escapism that is Lace. Lace and Lace II knew what they were and didn't give themselves airs.
The Perfect Couple, in contrast, is tiresomely pretentious. If it's just supposed to be light entertainment, why is the pace so languid? Why are there so many extreme close-ups? Why is the background music whoo-whoo-ing in the background in an abstract, non-hummable way? It feels like the series wants to be Big Little Lies very badly. I'm not saying Big Little Lies was a masterpiece, but it offered something unexpected which gave it some substance: far from always being at each other's throats, the yummy mummies did offer one another real friendship. The Perfect Couple is devoid of any such nuance. The wealthy suspects are horrible, the investigating police charmingly down-to-earth, the "normal" girl about to marry one of the sons of the super-rich family Sees Through The Façade etc. These aren't even entertaining clichés (though I liked the cops), and they're served up in a po-faced manner which makes you suspect that the series has ideas above its station.
I'm usually indulgent towards pronouncements like "TV series are the new novels". They're not: novels are the new novels. But it does television no harm to try to emulate the dramatic storytelling and vivid characterisation of, say, a Victorian page-turner. Except, the rising status of TV in the last few decades comes at a cost. The same artsy types who've made novel-reading an endurance sport have muscled in and suddenly want to tell us what is "quality" television and what is not. Anything too upbeat or watchable is sneered at, when entertainment (and perhaps some light instruction) was once TV's prime function.
In that way, you really could say that TV series are "the new novel". Novels were once written mainly for entertainment too, then they became Something Fancier. Now TV has become Something Fancier, and along with the TV equivalent of Victorian ripping yarns have come the less welcome TV equivalent of those high-brow novels all the critics praise to the skies, but few of us ordinary mortals have actually read, because frankly they sound awful. That's exactly why the critics love them, I suspect. If they were too appealing, then there wouldn't be much cachet in having read them – or, in the case of TV series, having seen them.
What's this got to do with The Perfect Couple, you may ask? It may be a bit pretentious, but it's hardly trying to be a TV version of Ulysses. Well, my (largely unsubstantiated) theory is that some conceptions of "quality" television have trickled down to what could be called "middle-brow" programmes, and have had a detrimental effect on them. Pacy storytelling? Way too cheap. Witty dialogue? Good heavens, no, this isn't an ordinary cop show. Sexual tension? Problematic. Romance? Well and truly dead, darling.
You can still find pacy stories, snappy lines and romance on the telly, but you increasingly have to move to the cheerfully low-brow spectrum of TV in order to get your fix. So be it, then. Maybe it's about time I rewatched Lace?
