Dear All,

he Netflix show The Perfect Couple had such good reviews that I thought I must check it out. After all, Nicole Kidman was in it and seemed to be getting quite a lot of attention. So, I watched it and discovered that it’s a murder mystery featuring a very wealthy and dysfunctional family gathered together at their luxury holiday home on Nantucket, an island south of Cape Cod, where many rich people have holiday homes.

I managed to sit through this six-part series despite the fact that I found the characters pretty despicable; mostly the wealthy characters, that is. In addition to this, the structure of recurring flashbacks used in this production is pretty annoying and very repetitive. As I watched this show I was moved to ask myself this question: why do people keep making programmes about rich people and why do audiences like to watch such shows?

The Perfect Couple reminded me of another recent TV show starring Nicole Kidman – HBO’s The Undoing. In that show, the life of a wealthy New York couple, a therapist (Kidman) and her oncologist husband (Hugh Grant) is turned upside down in events linked to a murder. The milieu depicted is that of affluent Manhattan, of glittering fundraisers and snobbish private schools. In The Undoing Kidman and Grant appear to be the perfect couple themselves until Grant disappears and a series of lies and untruths are uncovered. Some reviewers called this show a ‘marriage thriller’ with lots of twists and turns. To me it was a fairly sensationalised, fairly creepy depiction of perfect lives turning out to be not so perfect. And it had the usual voyeuristic element of taking viewers into rich people’s houses, to see how they live and socialise. Plus, the plot was slightly absurd and really the only redeeming feature was how good Kidman looked and the delightfully stylish green coat she was wearing.

The Perfect Couple is the same sort of deal. The New England family is very rich. The steely Kidman is the scary matriarch controlling everything, her husband (Liev Schreiber) is the one whose family has all the wealth but he basically seems to have no aim in life except getting high, going sailing or using seabirds for target practice. The three sons (Trust Fund brats) are not very likeable either as they have a huge sense of entitlement besides being emotionally stunted. Ho hum… But at the beginning it all looks great: the family have gathered for a wedding, it’s all glamorous and there’s a group dance on the beach choreographed in Bollywood style.

In The Perfect Couple,the bride to be is not from an affluent background so this is a new world for her and one she’s not sure she likes much. Despite this, the themes of class and wealth are not explored thoroughly and are only referenced by the eyebrow raising or surprised expressions of the police investigators when they interview the rich people and hear what they have to say and the way they say it.

In my opinion, films and shows that feature luxury homes and depict the super-rich serve to almost normalise their obscene spending and their extravagant lives. This works in the same way that the reporting of the weddings and parties of the super-rich does. For example, when Indian billionaire families have weddings where they fly in international celebrities and world leaders, give their guests party favours like Rolex watches and have endless multi-million dollar parties, people look at the pictures and follow the events almost compulsively because the media gives this relentless coverage.

The type of coverage such events get is star-struck and overawed in tone. There is talk of how much things cost and what people wore and who attended but there is very little comment on the actual moral dimensions of this, on what the money spent on the parties could have bought in terms of food, development projects, life-saving aid, clean water, hospitals etc. The events around the recent Ambani wedding, for example, went on for some seven months. It is estimated that the wedding cost over $100 million (an event management owner estimated to the BBC that the cost would have been between 11 billion and 13 billion rupees).

Surely the media can make some sort of comment on this? At some point surely – like perhaps by the fifth mega party? Not just report on how much the outfits cost and who designed them but actually talk about the social context of such expenditure and its political implications?

Basically, there doesn’t seem to be any decorum left when it comes to rich people and their parties. You might recall that among the guests at the Ambani wedding was the former Labour prime minister, Tony Blair. Once the leader of the Labour party, a party supposedly aligned with workers’ rights and the trade union movement, Tony Blair seemed to see no contradiction in attending this bonanza of obscene spending and extravagant ostentation. Because when it comes to rich people and their parties, everybody just wants to be there –no matter what their stated principles or politics are.

This is also what we are encouraged to do through our screens: to enter the world of the mega-rich, gawk at their fancy clothes and designer accessories, marvel at the opulence of their homes and listen in as they talk about their private jets and their diamonds... Media and films exploit this audience fascination shamelessly. Often the locales and the interiors have more weight than any actual plot.

Yes, films and TV can provide us with some enjoyable, escapist entertainment but a staple diet of this wealthy people voyeurism also glorifies rich people and underplays questions of income disparity and exploitation. It messes with our value system and aspirations making us believe that expensive designer belongings are the end-all and the be-all.

Perhaps, we need to remind ourselves of these words attributed to Albert Einstein: “If most of us are ashamed of shabby clothes and shoddy ideas, let us be more ashamed of shabby ideas and shoddy philosophies.”

Best wishes.

Umber Khairi