The woman behind ‘The Perfect Couple’ has a trove of beach reads waiting to be adapted
Netflix’s hit drama series The Perfect Couple is currently topping the streaming charts, luring audiences in en masse with its (mostly) fun assessment of the upper class. And some might be interested to learn that the show isn’t an original story—rather, an adaptation of a best-selling summer novel.
The Perfect Couple is here, and to many, it’s the perfectly addicting kind of end-of-summer nonsense; a murder mystery rocks the world of some old money Nantucketians, leading to a cat and mouse chase that exposes even more family secrets, betrayals, and deception. Showrunner Jenna Lamia definitely channels some The White Lotus vibes here, as the title The Perfect Couple couldn’t be farther from the truth for our married pairs.
The six-episode miniseries stars Nicole Kidman, Liev Schreiber, Dakota Fanning, Eve Hewson, and a bevy of other A-listers who find themselves wrapped up in shocking crime when a body is discovered hours before a lavish wedding. Everyone in attendance suddenly finds themselves suspect No. 1, leading us on a thrilling (and pretty silly) whodunit chase.
And like many of Netflix’s best productions, The Perfect Couple is actually based on a book.
The Perfect Couple is based on a novel, but it’s far from a beat-by-beat adaptation
Elin Hilderbrand is the definitive queen of the beach read, having penned popular works like Swan Song, The Hotel Nantucket, 28 Summers, and Golden Girl—most of which, as suggested, take place in Nantucket. She released The Perfect Couple in 2018, and the domestic fiction/mystery/romance novel went on to top the New York Times bestsellers list, making it unsurprising that Netflix bought the rights years later with the intent of making a TV adaptation.
Interestingly, there are quite a few differences between what plays out on screen vs. the pages of the book, including the name of its lead character (Angela is called Celeste Otis in the novel) and a wildly different ending, which I won’t get into here for the sake of spoilers.
Why the changes? Well, it’s hard to say, but for pacing and clarity’s sake, certain background details or character arcs will often be left out of a movie or TV show adaptation, as they simply read better in the book. After all, it’s hardly a rarity for showrunners to take creative liberties by tweaking a story’s tone or “modernizing” the source material for contemporary audiences—for better or worse.
Thankfully, things seem to have worked in The Perfect Couple‘s favor. The drama series hit 3.4 billion minutes watched on Netflix following its premiere on September 5 according to a recent Deadline report, putting it above popular titles like Hulu’s The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives and even Prime Video’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. Suffice it to say, we can probably expect to see a whole lot of Elin Hilderbrand’s name in the near future, as she has many books for Netflix to adapt next.
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