Critics and writers were shocked by the season finale of The Undoing, created by David E. Kelley and directed by Susanne Bier. Not by the way the show wrapped up—by its popularity. On social media, viewers eagerly live-tweeted the episode, seemingly for the first time. Twitter-famous lawyer @nycsouthpaw mused aloud, “I wasn’t aware the undoing was even a thing until this very evening?” while New Yorker writer Emily Nussbaum admitted, “Feeling kind of left out on this whole Undoing situation, based on Twitter I’ve deduced that a fancy coat played by Hugh Grant killed a baby.” Had a large audience actually been following the show this closely all those weeks? Was this murder-mystery-cum-procedural—starring Nicole Kidman as Grace Fraser, a numb, naive, and dazzlingly rich clinical psychologist sporting hideous knit outerwear—a sleeper hit? Or was this mediocre “prestige” drama just in the right place at the right time?
It’s obvious that this year, more than ever, we’re tethered to our screens. And with HBOMax joining the list of streaming platforms trotting out series after series in order to entice new subscribers, there’s never a shortage of plot-driven dramas to keep us watching. But what the series missed was the opportunity to lay bare the labor of those who prop up and protect the lives of the rich. Its similarly-themed network mate Succession pays clever attention to the most unsightly aspects of wealth; The Undoing, though, tried hard to make us empathize with Grace and her immediate family, amounting to a fatiguing psychological exercise.
I can’t be alone in admitting that despite watching the series week to week, there was never a point where I genuinely cared about what would happen to The Undoing’s main characters. Hugh Grant, playing Kidman’s pediatric oncologist husband Jonathan—who stupidly flees after happening upon the bludgeoned-to-death corpse of his mistress (or so he says)—is an aging dandy who has no chemistry with his wife, yet desperately holds onto their perfect image. Kidman’s father Franklin (a bearded Donald Sutherland) is Rockefeller-level wealthy and frequents the Frick Collection, where he also happens to take a series of impromptu meetings about his only child’s predicaments. Honey Boy’s Noah Jupe, once again dutifully taking on traumatic American childhood, is Grant and Kidman’s fancy-private-school-attending and violin-playing son Henry, who is just dying to go on a roadtrip with Dad.
Much more compelling are the show’s lawyers—no surprise coming from Kelley, who also wrote the much more openly frivolous Ally McBeal, The Practice, and Boston Legal. Lily Rabe plays Kidman’s bestie Sylvia, a gorgeously dressed, tenacious single mom and corporate litigator who tries to keep her unravelling friend in line. You’re never asked to like her—Sylvia is terrifyingly competent in the way that corporate lawyers often appear to be—yet somehow she’s one of the only people you trust. Noma Dumezweni is similarly arresting as Haley Fitzgerald, the family’s high-priced defense lawyer, who sees their shortcomings so clearly because she has made her fortune making the extremely wealthy unaccountable. I would’ve watched a show exclusively about Sylvia, Haley, and the fumbling millionaires and billionaires they deal with on the day-to-day—but what executive producer could resist Nicole and Hugh thrashing through their marital woes and the violent killing left in its wake?
One wishes, though, that they would have resisted a little bit more. Most of The Undoing is focused on a couple so utterly uninteresting that even a world-wary detective (a strangely underutilized Edgar Ramírez) seems bored by them. Bringing in Grace for questioning time and time again, he quickly gets fed up with her relentless confusion. And it’s a feat to make actors like Kidman and Grant, portraying characters steeped in absurd wealth and a deluge of scandal, lackluster. At one point, I yearned for the show to reveal Franklin as the murderer so that Sutherland could spend the rest of the season stalking through the scene like Shakespeare’s Richard III.
Alas, Franklin turns out to be the most upright and thoughtful person in the room (besides Sylvia, maybe). All he’s left to do is look worriedly on as his daughter decides whether or not to stand by her formerly dashing, now destitute husband. Haley, lashing out at Jonathan mid-trial, makes a last ditch attempt to stir the waters; instead, we get flashbacks amidst a car chase. Perhaps we were all watching to see if Jonathan could, on the strength of charisma alone, rise from the ashes of violent narcissism—or if, for once, the powerful and reckless would have to pay.
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