“The Perfect Couple” Showrunner Jenna Lamia on Meghann Fahy’s Mesmerizing Merritt Monaco
In part one of our interview with The Perfect Couple showrunner Jenna Lamia, she discussed adapting Elin Hilderbrand’s novel, character development, and writing the script. Now we move on to some of the specifics of how Lamia stuck the landing, delivering a satisfying whodunit on the picturesque island of Nantucket, the playground of the uber-wealthy Winbury clan.
In the final shot of the penultimate episode of The Perfect Couple, Merritt (Meghann Fahy) is sitting on the beach in her robe, tears stained on her cheeks. The night of her murder has been played out in flashbacks in previous episodes, and viewers are aware of almost every possible scenario for who killed her and why, but we’ve never gotten this close to the actual event. As she sits in the wee hours of the morning, she hears footsteps behind her. She turns her tear-streaked face and says, “Oh, hey,” a bit surprised but with enough familiarity for viewers to understand Merritt knows this person. The screen fades to black, and we are left tantalizingly close to Merritt herself, identifying her killer for us.
Lamia delves deeper into the show’s symbolism, creating sympathy for a character who is only alive onscreen for one episode, and the filming schedule for a limited series. Spoilers below.
I want to talk about the final shot of the fifth episode, the cliffhanger, where Merritt turns and says, “Oh, hey.” How did that scene specifically come to fruition? Was that how you originally envisioned that scene in your head?
It’s so satisfying when a moment that you’ve seen for the entire gestation of the project comes to life just the way you saw it, and that is one of those moments. So, I’m so glad you brought it up. Because that was very early in the writer’s room, and we knew several characters had the possibility of having joined her out on the beach. And other things changed since we put that moment in. There were other characters planted nearby in different ways. But I just knew that was going to happen, that her character was going to turn around and say, “Hey” in a way that’s going to make you want to get out your forensic kit. How well does she know this person? She seems kind of friendly but a little bit apprehensive and a little unsure. It came together literally exactly how I saw it in my head when I wrote it, which is such an incredible feeling for a writer.
In perfect world, what did you want the viewer to feel when we find out who the killer is in the finale?
It is my fervent hope that when you find out you will feel satisfied and feel that we have played fair with you as an audience. That was the hardest part about writing this is I love, love to watch these kinds of shows and I really love when I feel that the writer has played fair with me. And I love when I didn’t guess it, but it feels justified.
When we first see Merritt, she’s introduced as this party girl, but that changes over the episodes when we get to know who she really is, especially when we find out she is pregnant. When you’re dealing with a character who is the victim, is it hard to find a way to make her compelling enough and relatable enough to the audience to care about who killed her?
Not when Meghann Fahey is playing her. I can’t imagine someone I would rather take home with me. She is such a beautiful person and made Merritt into such a beautiful person that you can’t help but absolutely adore her and her friendship with Amelia [Eve Hewson], which I think is the true love story of the show. But I love that you noticed that about her character because that’s exactly one of the arcs I was so committed to doing, which is it would be easy to dismiss her at first as a party girl or a gold digger or, dare I say, a slut — which I think is funny when Isabele’s [Isabelle Adjani] character says it. Because, number one, there’s nothing wrong with a woman who wants to have sex with a lot of people. Let’s get that out of the way.
This show features many close-ups of eyes and eye imagery. Can you explain where that comes from?
That definitely comes directly from our director, Susanne Bier. Luckily, we had two DPs who were both incredible, and I know they talked about that early on. But I think this show is asking you to think about the inner lives of these characters, and those kinds of shots bring you so close, but they can’t bring you inside. So, I think they remind you that you may not always know exactly what this person is thinking, but you know they’re thinking more than they’re projecting from a mid-range distance, which is how we all experience one another. The show a lot is about the projection of an image, a perfect image — what we’re telling the world about who we are and how great our life is, which is a very Instagram phenomenon, by the way, and inspired by Merritt’s influencer background. But what Suzanne [Bier] is doing with the camera is reminding us that there’s so much more than we are being presented with from a distance, and we should think about that and think about what’s behind there.
Was the series filmed chronologically?
It was filmed like a feature in that all six scripts were completed before we even started pre-production. There was a long pre-production process for this show. I had a team of writers, and we finished our work as a group in June. This show didn’t begin shooting until April. So from that June to the following April, I was rewriting on my own and having the cast join and rewriting for certain casts, getting Susanne Bier on board, and finding locations. So the show had this whole other revision after the team of writers was finished. And then, when we started shooting, we had all the scripts. That enabled us to blockshoot everything that happens in a certain location all at once. We shot almost all of the police station scenes in April because a lot of those are interior, so it was easy for us not to worry about the fact that outside, there were no leaves on the trees yet, and the grass really wasn’t green yet. Then, we were interrupted by two labor actions, a writer’s strike, and an actor’s strike. So when we were able to resume work, we had to shoot a lot of the interiors in London on a soundstage.
For a show like this that’s really character-driven, what are the biggest costs?
I think it was really important to everyone to get Nantucket right, and we did look at a couple of different locations. But you can’t really approximate New England; the flora and fauna are pretty unique. So the sea grass and the dunes and the beaches just needed to look right. Being from New England, I have a sort of bet noir with things where the accents are wrong, or the topography is wrong, and it’s supposed to be New England. So, from a very early stage, I talked to the producers and to Netflix and locations about getting that right. And we did probably save some money by shooting in Cape Cod, not shooting on the actual island of Nantucket. Though a lot of the exteriors are Nantucket. The town is Nantucket. But the house that we shot at is Cape Cod, so we certainly allocated our resources to get the look and feel of New England right. And beyond that, we didn’t want to skimp on the clothes. The clothes are a huge character in the show, and our costume designer, Steven Saland, is an absolute genius with color and sense of place. So those are critical. That’s where our resources were spent. We don’t have a ton of visual effects.
Did you feel any pressure to distinguish this from shows like The White Lotus or Big Little Lies?
Maybe I should have, but the thought that this show would even be included in the same category as Big Little Lies or The White Lotus makes me so happy that no, I only felt the pressure to get this show to a level where it might be included or mentioned in the same breath as those shows, and Succession, which I think is the best-written show I’ve ever seen in my life. So I did aspire to literally be mentioned in the same breath as those shows. I read some David E. Kelly scripts, just the raw form of some of his Big Little Lies scripts, and I of course watched and re-watched all episodes of Succession and The White Lotus because those three shows are really the tops for me.
The Perfect Couple is streaming on Netflix.
Featured image: The Perfect Couple. (L to R) Liev Schreiber as Tag Winbury, Meghann Fahy as Merritt Monaco in episode 103 of The Perfect Couple. Cr. Courtesy of Netflix © 2024
