Mild spoilers ahead.
It's hard to watch "The Undoing" without thinking of the last miniseries David E. Kelly wrote for HBO, "Big Little Lies," which also happened to star Nicle Kidman. We're back in the world of the privileged elite, who coexist nervously with the less fortunate, and are all too aware of the outsized scrutiny they attract. This time Kidman plays Grace Fraser, a psychologist married to a celebrated pediatric oncologist, Jonathan (Hugh Grant). They have a son, Henry (Noah Jupe) who attends a posh Manhattan private school with a boy named Miguel (Edan Alexander). It's Miguel's beautiful mother Elena (Matilda de Angelis), whose appearance in Grace's world signals the end of her seemingly perfect life. Soon Elena is brutally murdered, and Jonathan is the main suspect.
"The Undoing" runs for six episodes, directed by Susanne Bier, who does an excellent job of maintaining the tension and ambiguity of the characters through the entire series. I can think of no better compliment than to admit that I wasn't sure who the murderer was until the last episode. However, the point of the show isn't figuring out whodunnit, but wrestling with the doubt that keeps rearing its head. We're put into the headspace of Grace, who is desperate to hold her family together, and is perhaps a little too willing to believe that her charismatic, unstable husband could never do the things he's accused of doing. And while Nicole Kidman is very good here, it's definitely Hugh Grant who steals the show. Jonathan Fraser is such a bundle of contradictory information, but it all comes down to Grant's performance. He's sympathetic and charming and so good at putting on a show that you want to believe him, even when everything he says is improbable.
I like how the show's creators use the common tropes of the mystery genre against the audience. We've been so primed to expect twists and turns and secrets in these kinds of stories, the red herrings are often irresistible. Why is Grace's father, played by Donald Sutherland, so adamantly against helping Jonathan? Surely Elena's husband Fernando (Ismael Cruz Cordova) knows more than he's letting on about the night of the murder. Or what about Grace's best friend Sylvia (Lily Rabe), who seems to know everything about everyone? Or what about Grace herself, who has clearly been under a lot of strain? David E. Kelley only has to make the most innocuous suggestions, and the speculation easily runs rampant. There are two episodes that end on juicy pieces of evidence being uncovered, which aren't actually what they seem.
"The Undoing" is highbrow melodrama, and indulges in all kinds of courtroom theatrics and soap opera logic that wouldn't pass muster in a more grounded kind of legal thriller. The media scrum is milked for all it's worth. However, if you can suspend disbelief, it's such fun to see the court battles unfold, and the big name cast getting into these juicy performances. The Grants hire a lawyer named Haley Fitzgerald (Noma Dumezweni), who is a standout in the later episodes for her no-nonsense, breathtakingly cynical way of operating. I love how she clearly figures out the truth long before Grace does, but that it wouldn't matter one way or another to her legal strategy. I love that the POV shifts unexpectedly between different characters, especially in the finale where we finally get inside Jonathan's complicated head.
Viewers who are expecting a more typical, fast-paced mystery show may be disappointed with "The Undoing," because it's another kind of animal entirely. It's far more of a psychological thriller, one that gets a lot of its power from an unusual amount of slow, deliberate character and worldbuilding. So much is implied here without being made explicit - the obvious class difference and power imbalance between Grace and Elena's families, the insular private school culture, and everyone's use of social media. In hindsight, the first episode is less about introducing Grace than it is about establishing Elena's motives, a woman who desperately wants to be part of the Frasers' world, but is marked as an outsider from her first appearance.
Was six hours really necessary to tell this story, though? Probably not, but I enjoyed every minute of them.
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