Nicole Kidman has worked hard over the past decade to parlay her Hollywood fame into a parallel career as a force in prestige television. She hasn’t given up on the big screen, and was recently to be found steaming it up in a romp about a brief but intense affair with a much younger man, Babygirl. But it is with shows such as Big Little Lies that she has had the most success – a track record that comes to a tumultuous halt with the appalling second series of Nine Perfect Strangers (Prime Video from Thursday).
Season one was an undercooked tale of paranoia and skulduggery set amidst a retreat for the mega-wealthy. It had the bad luck to launch in the same summer as White Lotus – a tale of paranoia and skulduggery set amidst a retreat for the mega-wealthy. One became a phenomenon, the other did not - despite top mugging by Kidman as gurning guru Masha Dmitrichenko in her unsettling statement wig.
Four years later, Masha is somehow still in business, despite the previous season culminating in an orgy of paranoia and violence. True, several massive lawsuits and “multiple Federal investigations” are looming. No matter. A billionaire in the Bavarian Alps wants to whisk Masha – and her new wig – away from her legal woes, on the proviso she runs another retreat with another nine volunteers.
Kidman does her best, but her performance is 90 per cent iffy Russian accent. Meanwhile, this year’s cast of dysfunctional one-per-centers make for a threadbare bunch – the quality of guest cameos low to non-existent. Series one featured Melissa McCarthy, Michael Shannon and Luke Evans – the best the follow-up can muster is White Lotus’s Murray Bartlett (as a disgraced kids’ TV presenter) and indie singer King Princess, playing a tortured piano prodigy. The biggest star aside from Kidman is Mark Strong, a mega-bucks baddie who shares a dark history with Masha.
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The White Lotus-ness of it all is hard to get past. The difference is that the HBO hit had the pretence of social satire (that satire was, in fact, just hipster nihilism, but it did string you along convincingly). Nine Perfect Strangers, by contrast, has nothing to say, and while it knows what it wants to be – Agatha Christie for audiences weaned on Succession – it has no idea how to get there.
Masha’s big gimmick is using psychedelic drugs to both unlock one’s inner trauma and, so she claims, communicate with the dead. However, the only people likely to be traumatised by this moribund thriller are the viewers. Unlike the characters corralled in Nine Perfect Strangers, they have the choice of running for the hills – an option many will find all too tempting.
Nine Perfect Strangers season two is on Prime Video now
