Kerry Washington in Rote Apple Murder Drama

If there’s anything I’m more sick of than shows about murder among the mopey denizens of ultra-wealthy enclaves, it’s shows about murder among the mopey denizens of ultra-wealthy enclaves in which one character’s upbringing in places like Bakersfield or Chino (or Cleveland or Buffalo, if the writers are feeling exotic) is treated with a condescending contempt normally reserved for lesser Trump cabinet officials, imbecilic Manosphere podcasters and the New York Jets.

Apple’s new — I’m hesitant to use “new” given how little in it actually feels “new” — limited series Imperfect Women isn’t the worst entry in television’s most exhausted genre, but it arrives so late in the genre’s lifespan that its generic blandness feels more offensive than jagged ineptitude. Some people will like Imperfect Women, because it features a bunch of actors who have earned our admiration and it bears a resemblance to other things that some people like. But it has all the creative flair of an eight-year-old performing “Heart & Soul” accompanied by a prerecorded track on a Casio keyboard — regardless of how good it is, any effusive praise is going to be performative.

Imperfect Women exists right on the edge of parody — that creator Annie Weisman’s background is dominated by dark comedies (Physical, Desperate Housewives) suggests this is at least vaguely possible, perhaps on some subconscious level — but without the self-awareness necessary to make it truly work as a guilty pleasure.

At one point, late in the season, the character with the offending history in Bakersfield — cue Rachel Bilson as Summer Roberts, “ew” — sees her teenage daughter dressed up for a so-called White Trash Party and rants, “Cosplaying poverty with your rich friends is not fun. It’s disgusting.”

Imperfect Women spends only a little time cosplaying poverty, but that’s because cosplaying wealth is so much more lucrative. Adapted from the novel by Araminta Hall, it’s the story of Eleanor (Kerry Washington), Mary (Elisabeth Moss) and Nancy (Kate Mara), best friends since college with a closeness that resembles co-dependence.

Eleanor comes from generational Black wealth, running a thriving nonprofit that mostly seems to throw parties. She lives in a fabulous downtown Los Angeles loft and she’s having a professionally inappropriate love affair with a younger underling, Rome Flynn’s Jordan. Note that Jordan isn’t really relevant as a character and also that Eleanor and Jordan’s relationship isn’t one of the 10 least appropriate relationships in the show.

Mary left a potentially fruitful academic career to raise three children with desiccated classics professor Howard (Corey Stoll). She has to manage a household that’s struggling, which you know because their obscenely nice Pasadena craftsman house probably needs a paint touch-up and the family Saab is in and out of the shop.

Nancy is married to professional business person Robert (Joel Kinnaman), son of another legendary professional business person (Keith Carradine). She comes from Bakersfield. And she’s dead.

Who killed Nancy? Was it her husband, her lover or, most uncouth at all, somebody from BAKERSFIELD? And why did they kill Nancy? Did it relate to the myriad secrets and lies being told by these three besties, lies they’ve been telling each other, and themselves, for decades?

Directed by Lesli Linka Glatter, followed by a strong trio of helmers, Imperfect Women is a shimmering depiction of several Los Angeles neighborhoods that, by virtue of barely existing in the real world, are rarely depicted onscreen. Here, they’re idealized to a hilarious degree, and I think part of the joke may be that these characters exist in such rigid bubbles that they’re able to carry the bubbles with them wherever they go, making every street pristine, every building graffiti-free and every restaurant or club trendy AF. Because Mary is poor — Pasadena homeowner poor — her outfits are a disaster, but Eleanor and Nancy look perfect for every occasion, and Imperfect Women is all about “occasions,” from ballet premieres to birthday galas to New Years fetes to humanitarian award shows to funerals.

If you haven’t watched TV for the past decade and haven’t sat through Sirens and The Better Sister and The Beast in Me — I have no clue why I’m listing those three titles in particular, though at least one of them knew the only way to cut through the clutter was via satire — and 15 shows starring Nicole Kidman, you might find the glitzy aesthetic and reasonably proficient thriller beats compelling. It’s easy to predict whodunit, but the specifics within the main mystery — a cavalcade of bad choices because these are, as the title helpfully explains, imperfect women — aren’t exactly obvious at every single moment.

There’s even a little bit of elegance to the way the first three episodes are delivered through Eleanor’s perspective, followed by two Nancy episodes and two Mary episodes. (I don’t remember what the finale was, because by that point I’d stopped caring about much other than getting to the inevitably forced conclusion.) That way, we’re constantly reminded that hero and villain, perpetrator and victim, are binaries that are often a matter of perspective, and that society makes those judgements about women in a very different way from how it treats men exhibiting similar behavior.

Imperfect Women is very smug in reminding us about the assumptions we’ve made — as if the only reason to think its main characters are privileged bad people doing bad things and getting away with them is that we’re slaves to the male gaze, liberated here by a quartet of exceptional female directors. Our heroes don’t suck! They’re imperfect. Fine. But imperfection is not inherently interesting, nor inherently artistic, no matter what Imperfect Women wants to suggest with its opening credit sequence evoking the Japanese art of kintsugi. Because not only is Imperfect Women fetishizing and cosplaying poverty and wealth, it’s appropriating Japanese art and tradition despite not having any other demonstrable interest in Asian culture.

The characters are so programmatically imperfect that I spent a while wondering what attracted the star-studded cast of extremely busy and frequently excellent actors. How busy? Joel Kinnaman has three different shows premiering this month. Who does he think he is, Nicole Kidman? Kinnaman’s OK, and unlike his other Apple show premiering this month, this one doesn’t require him to wear metric tons of old-age makeup. That must have been a relief.

A lot of it, I suppose, had to do with tweaking their screen images, though that might have been clearer if Imperfect Women were more clearly a parody.

Washington is playing Eleanor as a funhouse-mirror version of Olivia Pope — a woman whose confidence that she can handle every circumstance is woefully misguided, because she is imperfect (as was Olivia Pope, of course). It takes more than two-thirds of the season for Washington to get to a mannerism or emotional register that isn’t wholly familiar.

Moss, arguably the best television actor of her generation and inarguably television’s greatest evoker of the torment of having a child confiscated, gets to showcase that latter gift (it’s a custody thing), but through a character who makes avoidably dumb mistakes and lacks June Osborne’s fierce anger. Because she’s imperfect (as was June Osborne, of course).

Mara, who is not from Bakersfield, enjoys the challenges of playing a character who is from Bakersfield. She’s also played her share of imperfect women, from House of Cards to A Teacher.

Stoll is not, in fact, playing the same character he played in The Better Sister, because that character was rich and lived on the east coast and this character quotes Catullus and his Saab is in the shop.

My favorite performances in Imperfect Women come from Carradine, perfectly slimy and passive- aggressive with a minimum of screen time, and Leslie Odom Jr. as Eleanor’s brother Donovan, who serves no functional purpose in the series and yet makes everything better whenever he appears. A series about Eleanor and Donovan doing literally anything other than trying to get to the bottom of a murder in downtown Los Angeles would have been preferable.

I’m sure this review seems hostile, though I’ll repeat that I didn’t hate Imperfect Women. But the fact that I’ve seen a dozen similar-but-worse shows and a dozen similar-but-better shows in the past couple of years somehow makes this one feel more egregious. I get Hollywood’s point that rich people live hollow but aspirational lives and people from Bakersfield live trashy but fundamentally decent lives, and that murder is fun, but I’ve reached a breaking point.