A high-school teacher, he is there with his wife, Heather (Asher Keddie), and their daughter, Zoe, who is about to turn 21 and is played with affecting presence by Grace Van Patten.
Michael Shannon is also terrific as Napoleon Marconi, another believable character despite his cartoonish name. McCarthy is at her vibrant best, and is almost enough to save the series. Wry and sceptical, she describes Masha to the other guests as "an amazing, mystical, Eastern Bloc unicorn". Frances is rich, but McCarthy also makes her down-to-earth, and her emotional pain real. Melissa McCarthy is the standout as Frances, a best-selling romance novelist recovering from a relationship that has left her feeling foolish and duped. The spa guests who gather in the isolated retreat all have secrets and are damaged in some way. This tepid attempt to duplicate the previous successes has too many flat characters and a tone that flails from camp to comedy to drama.īased on a Liane Moriarty novel (as was Big Little Lies), the show has a bit of Agatha Christie in the setup.
Viewers know what they're getting, in a soothing, welcome escape.īut even a single rogue factor means you may have a flop on your hands, and Masha is simply one of the discordant elements Nine Perfect Strangers. The shows demonstrate why formulas work so well. And there is always some mystery, usually death by murder or accident. The upscale characters wander through sumptuously designed sets and are played by starry actors, from Meryl Streep to Hugh Grant. Themes of domestic abuse and class don't go very deep, but they give the outsized characters a rounded, tethered-to-reality quality.
#Another perfect stranger movie series series#
With a recipe as precise as that in any of Law & Order's countless spinoffs, the Kidman-Kelley series are soapy with serious underpinnings. The wig is one element in the formula Kidman and writer David E Kelley have devised in two hit shows so far: Big Little Lies and The Undoing. Throw in a Russian accent and she is Masha, the wraithlike Svengali of a wellness retreat called Tranquillum, where customers hope to be spiritually transformed during 10 days without mobile phones or junk food. Now the wig is pale blonde, straight, and the length of a small child. Voluminous red curls cascaded down her back in the recent series The Undoing. Or, if it turns out the season 1 ending wasn't just a reflection of Frances' writing and was reality, season 2 could delve into what happens after they all seemingly found happiness.In Nine Perfect Strangers, Nicole Kidman once more wears a Wig with a Life of Its Own. Which means if a second season did get green-lit, we could learn what really happened to the strangers. The fate of the strangers is somewhat unknown-it's implied that Jessica and Ben end up working at Tranquillum House Lars has a baby Tony reconciles with his kids and is happily living with Frances Carmel has healed from her trauma and now works in group therapy-but that could've all just been how the characters in Frances's book wind up. Masha didn't end up in jail after all and is shown cruising along the Pacific coast, with the hallucination of her dead daughter sitting next to her (implying that Masha is probably still doing a lot of drugs now that she's unlocked the power to see Tatiana). We learn that Frances penned a book, aptly titled Nine Perfect Strangers-a nod to the real-life book the show was based on-and that Masha definitely read the book and also stole (or was given) Ben's yellow Lamborghini. What could happen in Nine Perfect Strangers season 2?
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