I watched The Undoing on Now TV catch-up during a really busy week; as busy you can get in a Tier 2 lockdown. It was an awkward stop/ start way of doing things, which sometimes you’ve just got to do, to squeeze some prestige TV into your week, and I ended up watching episode one on two different devices. The major problem was I just couldn’t remember what the show was called, even after watching about 40 minutes . Oh Magic 8-Ball, will this show stick in my mind long enough to make any kind of impression? The 8-Ball says “Don’t count on it.”
The Undoing is led by a pair of very big names – Nicole Kidman and Hugh Grant as a very believable rich and successful married couple. The show is based on the 2014 novel You Should Have Known by Jean Hanff Korelitz and adapted as a six-part miniseries by David E. Kelley, whose most recent big hit was Big Little Lies, with which this series shares a whole lot of DNA.
Kidman plays the very elegant, almost regal, Grace Fraser, a successful therapist who lives in a super-fancy part of New York City with her husband Jonathan (Hugh Grant, doing exactly what you’d expect of him) , a superstar paediatric oncologist, and their son Henry (Noah Jupe), who attends the elite Reardon School – that’s and eye-watering $50,000 per year in tuition fees, and a school run that’s just a short walk through the beautiful wintery park. Grace helps some of the other Reardon parents plan an auction event to raise funds for the school and at a planning meeting Grace meets Elena (Matilda De Angelis). She’s new to the school and to this heady social strata – her son Miguel (Edan Alexander) is attending on a scholarship – and even before Elena rather proudly breastfeeds her baby at the table with a bunch of very buttoned-up small-c conservative women, she’s marked out as an entirely creature to her new peers. She seems to glare when a woman at the table jokes about hating her children. I think the theme of what makes a good mum and what it means to be a ‘real’ woman is bound to be explored in later episodes.
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