TV review: Murder mystery with too little suspense in The Undoing

Series creator David E. Kelley has won eleven Emmys and three Golden Globes - the latter for Ally McBeal and Big Little Lies.

Nicole Kidman has been awarded

so many prizes that she has got her own Wikipedia page. 

Add to that the big game like actors Hugh Grant and Donald Sutherland, as well as the Danish award-winning director Susanne Bier.  

In other words, when the quality series factory HBO makes six hours of TV drama of the best-selling novel You should have known, they have topped the team.  

Why such a dream team

 then fails to create a more engaging miniseries is hard to say.  

The Undoing is about the successful Fraser family.

Mother Grace (Nicole Kidman) is a couple therapist and father Jonathan (Hugh Grant) a famous pediatrician.

Their son plays the violin and goes to a private school that costs $ 50,000 a year.

They have a private driver and live in a huge apartment on the Upper East Side in New York.  

But one day, everything is smashed to pieces by a brutal murder.  

The Undoing is

at first strongly

of Kelley's latest HBO series Big Little Lies: the gossipy girlfriends, the curling parents with inexhaustible resources, the dark-haired stranger who stirs up emotions in the women's community.  

Grace and her friends put the bubble water in their throats one day when the dark and mysterious Helena from poor Harlem shows up on their parent committee.  

Helena is everything they are not:

she is an artist, breastfeeds her infant unabashedly during a sitting meeting and is, in recurring images of her, naked.

Her children's schooling is, we are told, scholarship-financed.  

You have to apologize if you assume that The Undoing intends to dig into breathtaking class divides.  

But the series quickly changes tracks.

Instead, it transforms into a kind of psychological family drama that we follow through Grace's perspective.  

The problem with that is that Grace,

in Nicole Kidman's interpretation, is so cool, so unfathomable, so enigmatic smiling as she stands and stares out into the New York night, that it is impossible to get a grip on her.  

After five episodes, it's still a bit unclear what Grace needs.

It is not facilitated by the shimmering images rushing by as the camera sweeps alarmingly close to her face: are they fantasies?

Memories?

Clues?  

Well.

There are good things here too.

The Undoing has the tone and confidence of an Important HBO drama, and partly wears the costume.

Hugh Grant has brought with him the acting energy from An English Scandal (2018), and makes a highly vital interpretation of Jonathan Fraser - a lovable bull's head and charming pediatrician but worse husband.  

Donald Sutherland, who plays Grace's father Franklin, makes a repentant patriarch who does not shy away from any means when it comes to family honor.

Franklin smells old money, plays carefree grand piano under oil paintings while his housekeeper paws in with the nightgown.

In the scenes with Franklin, Grace is the clearest and the series closest to its core: how privileges distort human morality.  

The review is based on the first five

episodes of six.

Therefore, the grade is almost a hypothesis - more diverse series have picked it up in the final.

But The Undoing is so far a reminder that even the biggest names do not guarantee a perfect product.