With friends like these, who needs opps? Apple TV’s “Imperfect Women” is an eight-episode roller coaster ride featuring extramarital affairs, lying friendships, undiagnosed mental problems, and murder. From top to bottom, this is an entertaining show with some incredibly annoying and frustrating characters.
Best friends for life or until death does them part
Created by Annie Weisman and based on “Imperfect Women” by Araminta Hall, the premise of “Imperfect Women” is immediately attention-grabbing. Three best friends—Eleanor “El” Bouchet, Mary Simpson, and Nancy Hennessy, played by Kerry Washington, Elisabeth Moss, and Kate Mara respectively—have their lives rocked when Nancy is found murdered. Washington’s passion (and a little bit of overacting), Moss’ disquieting stares, and Mara’s haunting presence really do a lot of heavy lifting for a story that is a bit too much, too unbelievable, and moves at breakneck speed.
Mary, El, and Nancy are all archetypes of women we recognize: the stressed mom on a lower income, the lonely, sad, rich girl, and the man-eating, child-free entrepreneur. They’re all so different from each other, one wonders how they even really became friends at all. The show doesn’t really answer that. It’s too busy focusing on how they’re keeping secrets from each other and betraying one another. It’s not all toxic; there are moments between the three of them that are genuinely sweet and capture an earnest, long-lived, hard-earned friendship. But what Ana Ortiz’s Detective Bethany Ganz had to say to Mary and El feels more accurate: “What the three of you had, I don’t even know what to call it, but it wasn’t friendship.”
Fitting a square peg into a round hole
Each lead gets their own spotlight across 1-3 episodes. The most enlightening (and frankly, interesting) were the Nancy episodes, timed perfectly to catch the audience right after a cliffhanger. It might feel like the show is getting stopped in its tracks, but it’s worth it, because we learn so much about Nancy, the Hennessy clan, and the friendship she shared with Mary and El.
The series being structured in this way is incredibly smart. If it were linear it would be about 4 episodes long, but Weisman separating the story out into chapters of sorts is in line with the source material and gives each woman breathing room to tell us their story.
Nancy’s death unravels years and years of secrets that the people she was forced to leave behind have to grapple with and clean up. Her husband, Robert (Joel Kinnaman), and her daughter, Cora (Audrey Zahn) are a part of an elite group of rich white people, while Nancy came from, essentially, white trash. Watching Nancy navigate the ins and outs of a culture she never grew up in is fascinating. This dichotomy works well and is one of the more interesting storylines. It also helps sell why Nancy would spiral and betray her husband.
The slow reveal of Nancy’s childhood trauma will wreck your nervous system. A child, whether a teenager or not, being coerced and abused by an authority figure in their life is a special kind of evil. The show doesn’t really handle this in a favorable way. It makes Nancy seem responsible for her own abuse, without truly focusing on the horrible conditions she grew up in, the awful mother she was born to, and the predator in her home.
A different type of Blackness
The episodes focusing on El in the beginning are crucial to set up the story, but we don’t truly get a sense of who she is until later in the season. That’s largely because the story relies on the audience getting to know her through other characters reacting to her. Her brother, Donovan (played with petty perfection by Leslie Odom Jr.), laments that his sister chases white men and that she would be better suited with a Black man. He consistently questions her Blackness, which makes their dynamic incredibly intriguing to watch.
While Nancy is the sad, rich, white girl, El is the aloof, rich, Black girl who has her own elitist attitudes that run counter to her friends who grew up differently. El’s privilege with being from a well-off Black family puts her in a league more similar to Robert Hennessy, and because of her long obsession with him, she feels she’s a better match for him than her bestie. And this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the fucked-up weirdness that makes up this trifecta of best friends.
The danger of boredom in suburbia
When we get to the Mary-centric episodes, the pacing of the story hits superspeed. We go from one escalation to another, and then another, and oh wait, yes, another. The somewhat slower pace of the earlier episodes does not prepare you for how fast things move after Nancy’s episodes. Mary’s obsessed with Nancy, stole her own husband from another woman, and has an Adderall addiction. She is the most “real woman” represented in the story; the suburban mom struggling to get through a life she didn’t really choose for herself.
Mary’s story is probably the most gut-wrenching of the three. Her coping mechanisms and (likely) undiagnosed mental illness has her crashing out spectacularly for most of the season. It’s a pretty realistic depiction of someone dealing with unrelenting grief. You have to applaud Moss for her performance throughout, especially with the very last scene that ends on her facial expression.
Final thoughts
One of the most profound pieces of dialogue in the entire series, that defines a lot of the besties’ struggles (and most women in real life), “You take a fragile woman, then you hollow her out until you are all that is left.” Revealing who said it to who would be a bit of a spoiler, but it was a heart-wrenching moment beautifully acted by one of our leads.
“Imperfect Women” is definitely worth the watch, even though you may end up rolling your eyes or yelling at your screen a few times because some things stretch suspension of disbelief. However, it’s a riveting adaptation with tremendous actors and one bob-cut/pixie wig that is working overtime on Washington’s head. Mara and Moss’ roles, in particular, are gripping, leaving the viewer with a sense of foreboding and loss. Kinnaman and Odom Jr. offer great balance to the drama while not taking away from the three main leads.
Rating
After a murder shatters the lives of three best friends, their decades-long bond is tested when an investigation reveals betrayals and shocking truths.
I am a published writer, full-time editor, an events and entertainment reporter and mother of one. Comic books, drag queens, women’s basketball, queer films and TV shows are my bread and butter.