The good news about The perfect coupleNetflix adaptation of Elin Hilderbrand’s novel about a death on a wedding weekend, is that the finale is a smash hit.

The pace is rapid. The resolution is satisfying – hard to guess in the moment, but perfectly logical in hindsight. And the tone is wickedly funny as the all-star cast, finally freed from the obligation to keep their characters’ cards close to their chest, plunge headlong into sarcasm, cruelty or previously undiscovered levels of “DGAF.”

Unfortunately, there is bad news about The perfect couple is… most of the rest. Although it’s not a particularly long film at just under six hours, the road to the end feels so endless that I can’t in good conscience recommend anyone embark on this journey just for the destination.

Plus, much of the show feels like it comes from better shows you may have seen. Billy Howle from FX’s excellent Under the banner of heavenonce again plays a man (Benji) who takes an unsuspecting, normal woman into his openly disapproving, suspiciously close-knit and ultimately toxic clan. Only this time, his family’s problem is not that they’re too religious, but that they’re too rich – “rich to kill someone and get away with it,” as one viewer puts it, or not quite “rich to kidnap someone,” as another puts it.

Benji’s lover Amelia is played by Eve Hewson, who thanks to her role in Apple TV+’s Evil Sisters. The happy couple have gathered with their family in Nantucket for their wedding, which will feature even more vaguely familiar characters – including Meghann Fahy as Amelia’s best friend Merritt, a sun-tanned charmer whose temperament conceals a deeper sadness, not unlike her Emmy-nominated role in HBO’s The White Lotus.

And then there’s Nicole Kidman. Her Greer, Benji’s mother, is another beautiful but brittle matriarch ripped from the bestseller shelves, whose seemingly perfect family begins to crack when someone in their expensive seaside town is killed and/or disappears. This is a role Kidman has already played in HBO’s Big little liesand while Amazon’s more upscale Expats proved that she can still mine new gold from this archetype, The perfect couple feels like Kidman on autopilot. Even the revelations at the end, juicy as they may be, do little to dispel that impression.

The premise is a fairly run-of-the-mill crime thriller—a body is found on the morning of Amelia and Benji’s ceremony, but the show takes its time revealing who it belongs to—but it’s executed in a disappointingly standard way. The perfect coupleThe similarity to all these other shows doesn’t do the series much good, however, as it struggles to strike its own tone in the vast majority of its six episodes.

Although it can be funny, especially when it borrows from Big little lies the conceit of a Greek chorus of witnesses who seem more excited by the opportunity to gossip than the possibility of a murderer in their midst isn’t consistently sharp enough to work as satire. It half-heartedly poke at larger themes like the impossibility of truly understanding a marriage or a family from the outside—the title refers to Greer and her husband, Tag (Liev Schreiber), whose idealized marriage is a key element of the marketing for their bestselling series of crime novels. (Yes, it’s all very meta.) But it doesn’t dig deep enough to really reveal the hearts of either of them, let alone unearth any new insights.

Director Susanne Bier (HBO’s The downfallanother part of the crime canon with Kidman as an unhappy white woman) gives the series a sheen that suits its star-studded cast and screams for awards. One of her favorite tricks is to zoom in very close to a person’s eye or mouth, as if asking us to think, really thinkabout what might be going on inside them. But such games are a poor substitute for real character development. The scripts are constrained by the need to keep us guessing for six whole hours, when the plot clearly cries out for the efficiency of a two-hour film. Most of the Winburys and their companions are too one-note to even be worth getting to know.

A few still manage to make an impression. I enjoyed it Crazy ex-girlfriendDonna Lynne Champlin plays Detective Henry, a mainland Chinese woman whose blunt intelligence and dry sense of humor provide a welcome contrast to the Winburys’ clueless entitlement – as does her platonic chemistry with Michael Beach’s Officer Carter, who gradually takes this outsider to his heart. In stark contrast, I was drawn to Dakota Fanning as Amelia’s future sister-in-law Abby, a mean girl who delivers her cruelest taunts in a honeyed tone. Though marked by mutual dislike, her marriage to Benji’s big brother Tom (Jack Reynor) – also a bully, but a far more blunt and crude one – is perhaps the most relatable romance in the entire series.

Abby may not be as deep as a character, but Fanning attacks her with an over-the-top enthusiasm that is equal parts terrifying and hilarious. If her portrayal seems to come from a completely different show than the one Kidman seems to be on most of the time — honestly, I’d rather watch Fanning’s.

As it turns out, The perfect couple seems to agree with me. Later in the series, a family friend (Isabelle Adjani) suggests to Amelia that there’s a reason Greer seems to hate her so much. “When people have spent their whole lives paying attention to what others say, they can’t bear to see someone…” she trails off in French before getting to the point: “It reminds them of their wasted lives.”

Too much of the series feels like it’s trying to be something it’s not: a prestige drama, a deep character study, a class commentary, a scathing portrait of a family in crisis. No wonder it’s such a sigh of relief when the finale simply abandons all that and goes for what it was always meant to be: pure popcorn fun with little else on its mind other than a desire to entertain and amuse. Too bad it feels like it took an eternity to get there.