“The Perfect Couple” on Netflix is the television equivalent of a beach read. That’s not derogatory. The six-episode series may be trash, but it’s high-toned trash, which provides all kinds of terrific pleasures when done well. As a prestige corker, it exists in an adjacent thematic neighborhood to HBO’s “Big Little Lies” with many of the same selling points: A murder mystery, an upscale coastal setting, Nicole Kidman.

Adapted from the 2018 novel by Elin Hilderbrand, the plot kicks off at a Nantucket wedding hosted by the groom’s wealthy parents, played by Kidman and Liev Schreiber. Everything is elegant and photo-ready at the Winbury family’s waterfront estate. Then a dead body turns up in the water. The nuptials are postponed and the police bring in each person, one by one — guests, employees, members of the family — for questioning. How inconvenient for the Winburys, who are all about their gleaming facade, no matter how fake. This is a family that occasionally asks their nearest and dearest to sign NDAs, so their obsession with appearances and obfuscation complicates the investigation.

Kidman is at the top of her game here as a regal, glorious snob who is unflappable, but wound so tight she just might snap. She’s a famous writer of murder mysteries (ironic!) and she’s the one who makes this lifestyle possible. Her husband comes from family money that has since evaporated, so it’s her sizable income that’s paying the bills. (It’s unclear if anyone else in the family actually works.) The pressure to keep up appearances isn’t just about social class, but about maintaining their carefully crafted personas — the perfect couple of the title — that has been so lucrative for her as an author. Schreiber, with his perpetual stubble and sun-kissed complexion, embodies a guy who is both sexy and unbothered. Perpetually on vacation, he’s content to smoke pot all day and be everyone’s object of desire.

They have three sons — too dull to name or describe — and the dysfunctions of the family become the central drama. Dakota Fanning plays a mean girl who is deeply unhappy beneath it all — of course she is, she’s married to a dud with a Winbury trust fund. Meghann Fahy is the maid of honor, and her performance is not unlike her turn on “The White Lotus” — sunny but hiding many secrets. That’s no insult to Fahy, she’s extremely good, but here’s hoping she doesn’t get typecast, she seems too talented for that. Eve Hewson plays the bride, who isn’t embraced by the family so much as tolerated and she brings a reluctant energy to the proceedings. Is this really all it’s cracked up to be? She’s down-to-earth and has modest origins that are a world away from this “stratospherically high rent district,” as the enclave of second (or third or fourth) homes is described in the novel.

The show has streamlined and tweaked the book, which means many of Hilderbrand’s droll observations about wealth have been excised (one of the Winbury’s cars, as seen through the eyes of the bride’s mother, “looks exactly like what people drive in across savannas of Africa on the Travel Channel”).

Changes are part and parcel of adaptation, and expected. But Netflix is treating the identity of the drowned person as a spoiler initially — first we must meet all the players at the rehearsal dinner on the beach before we find which one turns up dead — whereas the book lays out this information from the start. The mystery of who has been killed, which we learn soon enough anyway, is so much less interesting than the how and why and whodunit of it all. I say all this to suggest that perhaps we (and by we, I mean producers and media executives) have put too much stock in the power of spoilers when, really, good storytelling is enough.

“The Perfect Couple” needn’t have worried. Entertainingly absorbing and beautiful to look at, the show (created by Jenna Lamia and directed by Susanne Bier) has “general audience” written all over it and is a great example of what the genre can be when it’s handled with skill and wit. It’s more or less an Agatha Christie manor house mystery given an American sensibility, and the resolution, which is just one of the many ways the Netflix series diverges from the book, is a massive improvement from the source material.

There is no primarily point-of-view character but Hewson’s bride might be the most vital; she’s underwritten (that’s an issue with most of the lineup here), but her growing suspicion of the family she plans to marry into prevents the show from becoming yet another exercise in wealthaganda. Her distrust is the necessary splash of cold water on the show’s aspirational trappings — she’s an outsider who sees how empty this all is, and has no problem voicing her concerns. She’s not just another hanger-on hoping to benefit from their largess and it’s the essential perspective usually missing in these kinds of shows.

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'THE PERFECT COUPLE'

3.5 stars (out of 4)

Rating: TV-MA

How to watch: Netflix

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