“Sometimes I think we should move out of the city.”
Grace Fraser, the extremely put-together Upper East Side therapist at the center of the HBO mini-series “The Undoing” (premiering Sunday), says that to Jonathan, her extremely roguishly charming husband, but she’s not referring to Covid-19. She’s feeling suffocated by her own wealthy white privilege, embodied in the swirling nastiness that comes with being a Manhattan private-school parent. In terms of most-talked-about pathologies of 2020, “The Undoing” bats .500.
Created and written by David E. Kelley and starring Nicole Kidman as Grace, the six-episode series is, like their previous HBO collaboration, “Big Little Lies,” a murder mystery wrapped in a marital melodrama. It was based on Jean Hanff Korelitz’s 2014 novel “You Should Have Known,” whose title referred to a self-help book Grace had written and, more obliquely, to her failure to see the truth about that charming husband.
The show’s new, more dire title, with its horror-movie ring, directly reflects the point of the story, as Kelley has shaped it: the undoing of Grace’s comfortable life and seemingly happy marriage amid the unraveling of her illusions about Jonathan, who fairly early on becomes the prime suspect in a sensational murder. Since the demands of the glossy melo-mystery must also be met, the show dangles (through the five episodes available for review) the possibility that Jonathan is innocent — of murder, at least — and that the enraged Grace will find a way to forgive him for his abundant other sins.
This should all be sexily entertaining, and even fun, with Kidman and Hugh Grant playing Grace and Jonathan, and Kelley supplying the banter they exchange around the townhouse kitchen island. And for one episode it is. Grace is on the school auction committee, and Kelley and the director Susanne Bier make that the vehicle for an authentic and discreetly devastating portrait of the systemic smugness of her and her fellow moms.
They also introduce Elena Alves (Matilda De Angelis), the sloe-eyed, full-figured mother of a scholarship student from Spanish Harlem. She lands on the auction committee like a bombshell, silently nursing her baby amid the discussion of Hockneys and free preschool admissions counseling. She also lands on the story like an archetype out of the slightly distant and distasteful past, a disruptive sexual force from the potent lower classes. But at least she’s employed sparingly, and eerily, as a device to get us into the thriller plot, with her own spooky-funny music cues when she drifts onscreen.
The fun lasts a little way into the second episode, with Jonathan’s whereabouts uncertain, Grace’s nerves fraying and the shape of the mystery still unclear. It dissipates pretty quickly after that, though. The whodunit is slight and dreary, with Edgar Ramirez largely wasted as the lead detective. And the courtroom scenes, formerly a Kelley specialty, are tinny and theatrical. (Noma Dumezweni, as Jonathan’s high-priced lawyer, gives her speeches some gravitas; Sofie Grabol, of the original “The Killing,” is given nothing to do as the prosecutor.) Scene after scene, we’re put through the wringer of watching manifestly intelligent people doing stupid and highly improbable things on the witness stand, on TV or in response to late-night booty calls.
The primary victim of this is Grant, for whom the part of Jonathan clearly was designed, like a pair of bespoke gloves. “How much charm do you think you have?” his lawyer asks him, and the answer is, quite a bit. In the early scenes, as he cocks his head, thickens his voice and asks Grace, in that mock-abashed way, “Would you like to be washed?,” it’s all still there.
But the result of this tailoring of part to actor is that once Jonathan is the murder suspect and his secrets start to come out, the story turns on the question of whether he’s a sociopath or whether he’s, well, Hugh Grant. And that turns out to be an unwinnable proposition for the actor Hugh Grant, who, as the story progresses, resorts to self-parody in Jonathan’s moments of crisis — exaggerating the tics and hesitations we’re so fond of to try to sell the melodramatic claptrap with which he’s been saddled.
Kidman fares much better — she can do tormented golden child in her sleep, and she doesn’t hit any false notes as Grace. Donald Sutherland and Lily Rabe also spruce things up in roles that are right in their wheelhouses, as Grace’s master-of-the-universe father and her high-strung best friend. Douglas Hodge makes an impression in a few completely extraneous scenes as Jonathan’s public defender; the character’s one contribution to the texture of the show is that he holds his meetings in one of New York’s great neighborhood institutions, the Lexington Avenue steakhouse Donohue’s.
It’s possible, if you tune out the more risible aspects of the story, to enjoy (or bemoan) “The Undoing” for its visual evocation of a crowded, vital, pre-pandemic New York City. In that case the most important person in the production is the brilliant cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle (“Slumdog Millionaire,” “T2 Trainspotting”), doing an entire TV series for the first time. He captures New York as both dream and nightmare — in not quite hallucinatory streetscapes, or in the way a walk through the city takes you constantly in and out of sun and shadow. After a while, everything else about the show is just noise.
