An amusing game when watching bad television is to imagine how many performers passed on a role before the actual lead came on board. In the case of Kerry Washington and Apple TV’s Imperfect Women, my guess is that the list stretches to the dozens.
Despite her limitations as a screen performer, the one-time star of ABC’s Scandal is not the worst thing about Apple’s new show. That designation belongs to the writers, who spend much of the eight-episode limited series displaying an odd unfamiliarity with the conventions of drama. Whole scenes and characters amount to nothing, blanks in a narrative gun. An early episode makes much of an ensemblist’s “pain” but never shows us an example, leaving viewers to flounder in abstraction. If, as seems increasingly clear, streaming services need murder-of-the-week programming simply to keep the lights on, the least they could do is make such shows with care. Imperfect Women represents instead the utter exhaustion of the genre. The series is thoughtless, boring, unsexy, and punishingly dumb.
Washington plays Eleanor Bouchet, a nonprofit executive in present-day Los Angeles. When, 15 minutes into the pilot, Eleanor’s friend Nancy (Kate Mara) is found killed, our heroine must turn to the pair’s other confidant, Mary (Elisabeth Moss), for support. Can the two women, working together, solve Nancy’s murder? Or will long-buried secrets thrust the deceased’s “soulmates” into the investigative spotlight?
Poor acting abounds in the five episodes now available for streaming. Mara, beautiful but vapid, plays Nancy in flashback with a flattened affect meant to signal inner depth. It doesn’t. After nearly a decade on The Handmaid’s Tale, Moss is now incapable of any emotions beyond smugness and dismay. As Nancy’s husband, Robert, For All Mankind’s Joel Kinnaman brings his usual bro-ish energy, but has no chemistry with anyone else onscreen. Even Jackson Kelly, so good as a possible mass-casualty shooter on Season 1 of The Pitt, disappoints as Mary’s troubled teenage son. Then again, perhaps I’m just reacting to the script. If Kelly’s character isn’t hiding something, there is literally no reason for him to exist.
A well-cast lead might have seasoned this mess of pottage. Washington, locked from birth into an expression of pouty agitation, does no such thing. Like Moss’s Mary, the 49-year-old Eleanor clearly knows more than she’s letting on, a fact that produces not suspense but annoyance. Someone in this group is lying. Perhaps everyone is. Tune in next week for another hint or two about why.
Imperfect Women contains no subtlety, no real surprises. Yet even its predictable beats are amateurish, driven by thesis-statement dialogue (“Anger isn’t the opposite of love”) and paint-by-numbers bedroom fumbling. Yes, the show’s erotic scenes are bad, as well: a straining calf here and an “artfully” out-of-focus fireplace there. I would say that the production feels at times like a middling season of Beverly Hills, 90210, but that verdict would give the reader false hope.
Why spend 800 words abusing a show that could be dismissed in two (“Don’t watch”)? The answer is that Imperfect Women wears, beneath layers of inanity, an ideology as prickly as a hair shirt. At least since Desperate Housewives, ABC’s eight-season saga of murderous frenemies, television has advanced the notion that female camaraderie inevitably produces crime scenes. (See also: Big Little Lies, Bad Sisters, Yellowjackets, and several other shows I’m likely forgetting.) Call the phenomenon “homicidal feminism” if you like, but don’t imagine for a moment that two or more women will be allowed so much as a stroll by the river without a body floating by. Men never have this problem.
Imperfect Women is both the worst and the most cynical of these productions. Fundamentally avaricious and needy, Eleanor, Mary, and Nancy ignore and betray one another with tiresome repetition. Though the trio speaks frequently about the depth of their devotion, viewers see little evidence that they like one another at all. By Episode 4, having placed Eleanor in Nancy’s husband’s bed and telegraphed a second infidelity “reveal,” the series has rejected the possibility of loyalty conquering lust entirely. Were this merely the usual sexual-liberation bunkum, we might roll our eyes and change channels. Unhappily, Imperfect Women has in mind a project even more insidious.
One needn’t be a member of the Edmund Burke Society to recognize that the Left always and everywhere despises the “little platoons” that insulate citizen from state. A man in a faithful marriage — a woman with a friend — has something private on which to lean, a fact that mitigates both their fidelity to and dependence on centralized authority. In Imperfect Women’s universe of ideas, all of these relationships are fraudulent. Each one of us stands naked before the regime. Throw in a dash of misogyny — the show’s female creators plainly hold women in low regard — and one is left with a serious contender for worst dramatic series of the year.
If Apple’s latest has a redeeming factor, it is that its stupidity is so immediately evident that few viewers will take more than a few steps into the morass. The critic, of course, is less fortunate. Tell the world my story?
Graham Hillard is the TV critic for the Washington Examiner magazine and editor at the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal.