Hokum is served like posh canapés at a black-tie party in Imperfect Women (Apple TV), a tale of lies, female friendship and dreadful men. It is all set in upper-middle-class California and yet somehow manages not to feature Nicole Kidman. With the star of Big Little Lies having presumably decided to take the weekend off from the genre of giant‑kitchen murder mystery, the cast is instead headed by Elisabeth Moss, playing Mary, one of a triptych of college friends who remain tethered to one another in middle age.
That a trio of campus pals would continue to live out of one another‘s pockets decades later is, on the face of it, unhealthy – you really do need to move on after a while. Yet Imperfect Women argues that nothing is more precious than a friendship sustained by nostalgia for a past that isn‘t returning.
But then things take a turn for the bloody, when another of the besties, Nancy (Kate Mara), is brutally murdered and the hunt for the killer threatens to unravel the tidy fabrications with which Mary and the third musketeer, Eleanor (Kerry Washington), have embellished their lives.
In Mary’s case, this includes the shame – as the show portrays – of not being absurdly wealthy. She and her husband (Corey Stoll) live in a huge house in a desirable part of LA, yet the script implies that they are members of the working poor and thus deserving only of viewers’ pity.
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Eleanor’s fatal weakness is meanwhile presented as her relationship with a younger colleague at the non-profit she heads. Then there is the late Nancy, who grew bored with her megabucks husband (Joel Kinnaman) and took a lover. But what has become of her paramour, and how are they connected to the nude watercolour Nancy had installed in her livingroom before she was bumped off?
A more pressing question is whether anyone will wait around long enough for the killer to be unmasked. Because while Moss, in particular, is riveting as a woman trying to hold it all together as the ground gives way, the show suffers from clunky scripting.
It isn’t just the wildly implausible plot. It’s the way a decent cast is required to deliver lines which, however clever they may have read on the page, fall apart the instant they issue from human lips. “Remember that thing you told me about love?” Eleanor says to Nancy early on. “You said that love fills you up and infatuation depletes you.”
Nobody in the history of humankind has ever spoken like this, and that sense of watching a simulacrum of actual life carries through to the bonkers plot and the cumbersome twists the script chucks in at predictable intervals. There is always a market for swish thrillers about middle-aged people making all sorts of bad decisions – but Imperfect Women is far too flawed to fit the bill.
