Netflix's 6-Part Miniseries' Opening Credits Is So Good, I Can't Stop Thinking About It
When Chris isn’t working on a new article or exploring the best nature spots nearby, he's gotten into making TikTok edits. While he works on other personal projects, he has turned his attention to these edits for social media. They can be just for fun or get a little weird, but each one is to dust off his editing skills.
Rainy movie scenes set to a Spanish indie pop for a cozy vibe. A Mission: Impossible crossover with Halloween -- it somehow works with all the stunts Jamie Lee Curtis got put through. And a Saltburn theater reaction where not every dramatic theatergoer clutched their pearls, some understood it the erotic thriller it was. These are just to name a few.
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My first glimpse of The Perfect Couple wasn't Elin Hilderbrand’s novel, but the teaser trailer for the Netflix limited series that promised a lavish whodunit among a family who all, unsurprisingly, had a motive to kill. The stacked cast led by Nicole Kidman is easily one of the reasons to watch the series. But when the Netflix series finally arrived, there was something obvious I picked up on from the first episode. The whodunit behind The Perfect Couple’s inciting crime wasn’t going to be as compelling as uncovering how messy the Winbury family was.
Netflix was also promoting this series as “Big Little Lies meets The White Lotus” at the time Most of the time, comparisons like this are a marketing ploy, and they don’t hold any accuracy, which is the case for The Perfect Couple. It’s very different from those HBO dramas, and this is especially clear when the opening credits come on and out of nowhere — there's a dance number. Nicole Kidman’s piercing glare is nowhere to be found as she’s spinning and throwing her hands up along with the rest of the cast. Even after finishing the series, I don’t think I’m over the confusion of the opening credits. And what makes that sequence even more wild is learning how the show’s director had to fight to get it made when most of the cast opposed it.
‘The Perfect Couple’ Opening Credits Work for Me More Than They Should
Even if Netflix hadn’t tried to lure in new viewers with comparisons to the HBO dramas, it isn’t hard to notice how The Perfect Couple is influenced by them. Starring Big Little Lies alum Nicole Kidman and White Lotus Season 2 standout Meghann Fahy, it explores how rich folks unravel when their elite bubble bursts. For the most part, this is all the Netflix series shares with those HBO dramas, because The Perfect Couple is cheesier than either of them, which is why the opening credits work more than they should.
Collider Exclusive · 8 Questions · 2 Minutes Which Netflix Character Would Be Your Best Friend? Dustin · Emily · Wednesday · Gi-hun
Some friends drag you out of the house. Some sit with you on the worst night of your life. Netflix has written both, plus the one who tells you the truth you have been avoiding all week. Answer eight quick questions about how you actually do friendship, and find out which of them was always going to end up in your corner.
🧢Dustin(Stranger Things)
🗼Emily(Emily in Paris)
🕷️Wednesday(Wednesday)
🟢Gi-hun(Squid Game)
01
How do you usually end up making a new friend? The origin story says a lot about the friendship that follows it.
02
What is a perfect Saturday with your best friend? Friendship is mostly built out of very ordinary hours.
03
You call them at two in the morning. What happens? This is the real test of a friendship, and everybody knows it.
04
What do you want from them when you are clearly wrong? The best friendships are the ones that survive being corrected.
05
What do your friends actually value about you? The friend you attract says something about the friend you are.
06
You have a falling out. How does it go? How a friendship repairs itself matters more than how it breaks.
07
What do you actually need a best friend for? Everybody is missing something. The right friend fills that gap.
08
Ten years from now, what keeps the two of you close? Eight questions in, this is the one that decides who you get.
The Group Chat Has Spoken Your Best Friend Is…
Four Netflix characters, four completely different ways of showing up for somebody. This is the one who fits how you actually do friendship, and what having them in your life would be like.
Dustin Henderson
You do not do friendship at half volume, and neither does he. What you want is somebody who says yes to the plan before you have finished describing the plan.
- Dustin is the friend the entire show runs on: loyal past the point of sense, enthusiastic about everything, and incapable of leaving anybody behind.
- You have the same instinct. Your friendships are loud, specific and slightly ridiculous, and they last for decades because of it.
- He is also the one person who would take your strangest interest completely seriously, which is far rarer than it sounds.
- You would have a group chat. It would never once be quiet.
Emily Cooper
You are the friend who makes things happen, and so is she. Together you would be mildly exhausting to everyone around you and completely delighted with yourselves.
- Emily treats an ordinary Tuesday as something that could be turned into an occasion, which is either the best or the worst quality in a friend depending on your energy levels.
- You share her refusal to sit still. Neither of you has ever accepted a night in when something was happening somewhere else.
- She is far more loyal than people give her credit for. She defends her friends loudly, publicly, and occasionally before checking the facts.
- She would post the photo without asking. You would forgive her, because it is a very good photo.
Wednesday Addams
You have no patience for pleasant lies, and she has no ability to tell them. What looks like coldness from the outside is the most reliable friendship on this list.
- Wednesday never says a kind thing she does not mean, which makes the rare ones count for an enormous amount.
- You would rather be told the truth than be made comfortable. She is constitutionally incapable of offering you anything else.
- Underneath all of it she is ferociously protective. She simply refuses to make a performance out of caring.
- Do not expect a birthday message. Do expect her to ruin anyone who wrongs you.
Seong Gi-hun
You look after whoever is having the worst day. So does he. It is the least strategic way to move through the world and the best possible quality in a friend.
- Gi-hun is not the strongest player in Squid Game, or the cleverest. He is the one who keeps choosing to protect somebody else, over and over, at genuine cost to himself.
- You have the same instinct. You notice who is struggling and you stay with them, long after anybody would blame you for leaving.
- He is a flawed friend, and that is part of why it lands. He lets people down, then comes back and tries again, which is more than most manage.
- He would give you his last chance and never once mention that he had done it.
On a sun-lit Nantucket beach, the cast joins in a flash to dance to a Meghan Trainor song suitably named “Criminals,” for a sequence that is overtly cheerful. It’s depicted as a celebration (possibly) during the rehearsal dinner before a body is discovered the following morning and family secrets are exposed. Even before I made it halfway through the first episode, I knew if I wanted more of Big Little Lies or White Lotus, The Perfect Couple wouldn’t do that, all because of the opening credits. The ocean motifs in the addictive intro of Big Little Lies represent the inner lives of its central women. The anxiety-ridden score in White Lotus promises the unhinged stories that will erupt. These are two of the best TV opening sequences of the past couple of years that have stayed with me. In contrast, the opening credits of The Perfect Couple play out like viewers have been dropped into a dance party without any warning.
I'm Still Trying To Make Sense of ‘The Perfect Couple’s Opening Credits
The camera work captures everything cleanly with wide and medium shots, while the editing isn’t too rushed. Nothing spells out “danger”; there aren’t colorful dresses that are blood-stained in the opening of The Perfect Couple. Other than a credit for Netflix and the show’s title, no cast names are seen, further establishing this dance number as not a typical intro and more like a scene that has suddenly been inserted. Some viewers may hit the “skip” button fast, but others may just enjoy it for what it is. While I was watching the series, I started to see how this sequence represented a key theme.
Each time I saw the opening credits appear, it became a reminder of the artificial happiness within the Winbury family. At the head of bickering siblings and a cheating husband is Kidman’s matriarch Greer, who has carefully built a facade for the public to eat up on how her family is viewed, which gradually dissolves as the police investigation gets going. What sells this idea even more is how the cast themselves detested filming the dance number. Director Susanne Bier fought to get it made, telling IndieWire, “First of all, it’s going to be really joyful and fun, but it’s also going to suggest to the audience, ’Hey, you are allowed to laugh here. You don’t have to think this is very dark and very serious because it’s not.’” She had only one ally to help her along.
Nicole Kidman and Most of 'The Perfect Couple's Cast Didn't Want To Dance
Liev Schreiber, who played Greer’s cheating husband Tag, was up for anything. If you watched Schreiber in the gritty Ray Donovan or recognized the actor as the doomed Cotton Weary from the Scream franchise, his performance in The Perfect Couple would be one heck of a surprise. Not only did he sing more than once — that scene in Episode 5 is cringe-worthy in the best way possible — but Schrieber didn’t share the hilarious excuses his fellow cast members made to try to back out of the opening sequence. In a Variety article, Kidman and Fahy, along with Ishaan Khatter and Dakota Fanning, had a group chat to figure out a way to stop the dancing from happening with concerns based on character motivations.
Kidman complained she had on a tight dress and thought Greer would watch rather than join in on the dance floor. Schreiber went on to add, “The entire cast had a mutiny about this idea except for me; I was already in my trailer practicing the dance moves. I just like dancing, and I was kinda disappointed when it came out that I’m not in it more because I thought I did it really well.” Viewers don’t know the context of the opening credits, whether it existed in-show or not, and that’s part of the fun and the weirdness. But the original plans were, somehow, wilder.
‘The Perfect Couple’s Opening Credits Proves the Show Should've Been More Fun
Originally, dancing was in the script as part of a nightmare Amelia (Eve Hawson) has about her murdered friend Merritt (Fahy), seen in a later episode. While the nightmare was removed, Bier loved the concept of including dance in The Perfect Couple, and it became the last thing the cast shot. Choreographed by Charm La’Donna, who is also Meghan Trainor’s choreographer, the cast accepted doing the sequence, and Bier shot it within 90 minutes. But then, the series had another surprise for viewers. During the last episode, the dance sequence repeats at the end, and this time, director Susanne Bier joins the cast before the end credits roll.
More of the silly mood from the opening credits of The Perfect Couple should have been dispersed throughout the series. There are moments, but it isn’t until Episode 6, the finale, that it lets loose. Greer has a monologue that lets Nicole Kidman portray an exasperated woman who is done with fabricating the “perfect” image of her family or herself. She delivers one truth bomb after another, then has to specifically confirm to her family that she did not hire a hitman to silence Merritt. It's a much funnier scene than you'd think it might be.
The laughs the final episode got out of me were all based on the character relationships and Greer’s rigid personality that was well established; it’s just unfortunate the series never matched the energy of that opening dance number. It isn’t hyperstylized like the intro of Peacemaker, and it’s not as iconic as Jenna Ortega’s strange choreography on Wednesday. Still, viewers can watch The Perfect Couple let the Winbury family dance their spoiled hearts out on the screen before everything falls apart.
- Release Date
- 2024 - 2023
- Network
- Netflix
- Directors
- Susanne Bier
- Writers
- Jenna Lamia, Courtney Grace, Alex Berger, Bryan M. Holdman, Evelyn Yves, Leila Cohan-Miccio
KioskNews shows a cleaned-up reading view extracted from the publisher’s page — the original always lives on their site, not ours.