A PERFECT COUPLE BUT A MOST IMPERFECT CRIME DRAMA

WARNING: Don’t read this essay if you haven’t watched A Perfect Couple on Netflix. It is full of spoilers.

I have harped on this before, but it bears repeating because the situation just keeps getting worse. The contemporary TV crime drama relies way too heavily on some extremely illogical behavior by both the cops and the suspects involved in various mystery investigations. This current rant is inspired by the Netflix series A Perfect Couple, starring Nicole Kidman, Liev Schreiber, Dakota Fanning, and a handful of other talented and attractive people. The basic storyline is this: Kidman plays Greer Garrison Winbury, an insanely successful author of popular crime novels. Her books sell so well, in fact, that she and her husband, Tag, live in a $40 million mansion in Nantucket. What’s more, she seems to be keeping most of her deadbeat relatives afloat as well. As the story begins, one of the Winbury’s three sons is about to marry a young woman named Amelia Sacks. Amelia is from a normal – i.e. working-class – background (she herself works at the Brooklyn Zoo) and thus seems almost like a fish out of water amongst the wretched excess of the Winbury family. (Ironically, Amelia is played by Eve Hewson, who grew up extremely rich and privileged as the daughter of U2 front man Bono, whose real name is Paul Hewson. Eve Hewson is an excellent actress and completely believable in the role of the working-class outsider.) On the night before the wedding is scheduled to take place, Amelia’s maid of honor, Merritt Monaco, is murdered on the beachfront property where the Winbury family resides. The whole family and various guests were present on the property and celebrating the upcoming nuptials, so just about everyone at the party is a potential suspect. So far, so good.

The problem is that the police who investigate the murder do very little in the way of actual sleuthing. Most of what they learn about the crime they discover while interviewing subjects in that hoariest of all TV clichés the police interrogation room. These interrogations are handled by Police Chief Dan Carter and Detective Nikki Henry. Again and again they pull members of the immensely wealthy Winbury family down to the station and subject them to thoroughly hostile interrogations. Again and again, these cops seem to believe that they have arrested the murderer, only to have to release them at the end of the interrogation. This, of course, is absolutely insane. The Winburys are fabulously wealthy and well connected. They undoubtedly have an entire team of attorneys on retainer for any sort of emergency (considering how loathsome many of the family’s members are, the Winbury’s attorneys are probably kept fairly busy). The local police would not arrest a Winbury unless they had proof positive of that person’s guilt. Otherwise, they would open themselves up to a wrongful arrest lawsuit. What’s more, the Winbury clan would certainly be aware of their right to remain silent. And they would certainly insist on exercising that right. The Winbury’s are not nice people They are mostly arrogant pricks. Even the innocent ones, who had nothing to hide from the cops, would never in a million years voluntarily step into a police interrogation room and allow themselves to be verbally abused by a couple of prole police officers. What’s more, the family’s attorneys would be all over the place trying to thwart any sort of investigation into the Winburys. The local yokel cops would be informed that they are not to question any member of the Winbury family without an attorney present. The attorneys would be denying the police access to the Winbury home, the Winbury cell phone records, the Winbury vehicles, and the Winburys themselves. It is idiotic to think that every one of the hostile pricks who make up the Winbury family would allow themselves to be hauled in and interrogated like a common criminal. It simply wouldn’t happen.

I’m singling out A Perfect Couple here, but this particular idiocy is widespread in contemporary crime dramas. I realize that cops do often interrogate criminal suspects in dark and scary interrogation rooms. But on TV, we see all manner of wealthy people – doctors, movie stars, politicians, investment bankers – allowing themselves to be hauled into interrogation rooms and treated like common criminals. Occasionally the writers of these TV shows provide the suspect with a lawyer, but this lawyer generally does absolutely nothing. If the lawyer does make an effort to advise his client not to answer a question, he’ll almost always be rebuffed by a client who will angrily declare, “I’ve done nothing wrong. I’m not afraid to answer the question.” A self-respecting lawyer who has been neutered like that by his own client would probably just walk away. Why sit by and watch as your client ignores your very sound legal advise and creates immense difficulties for himself by blabbing angrily to the police.

I realize that some suspects do actually spill their guts to the cops in interrogation rooms. I once served as a juror on a murder case in which a seventeen-year-old suspect was questioned in an interrogation room for eight hours. Watching even selected segments of that interrogation session was painful as hell. The child was clearly frightened and the detective was able to manipulate him into saying anything he wanted him to. The suspect changed his story over and over again at the insistence of the police officer. The suspect claimed to be in one of three vehicles that were involved in the incident. The officer insisted that he was in a different vehicle. The officer offered no evidence to back up his claim. He just seemed to need to place the suspect in the other vehicle so that he could get him to testify as to what was said in that vehicle. The entire interrogation session was horrifying and, in the end, none of it was used in court and the child wasn’t charged with a crime. The jury was given access to a video recording of the interrogation simply because it had been entered into the evidence collected by the police. Neither the prosecution nor the defense ever used the video. It was easy to understand why the prosecutor never used it. The child was bullied into changing his statements so many times that it was impossible to know what the facts were.

But that was an impoverished African-American minor who apparently had no attorney and who didn’t understand his right to remain silent. Suspects like that may well sing like a canary when hauled into an interrogation room. But almost no college-educated professional is ever likely to utter a word in a police interrogation room. And if he has an attorney – which he almost certainly would – said attorney wouldn’t ever let his client be interrogated by the police. And, if the college-educated professional were a member of a fabulously wealthy and well-connected family, no cop would ever try to drag him unwillingly into an interrogation room. But in A Perfect Couple, the cops drag not one fabulously wealthy professional into their interrogation room, they drag a dozen or so of them in, and most of those monied elites are dragged in on more than one occasion. And all of this takes place in just the two or three days that follow the discovery of the murder. Our TV writers have become so lazy that they no longer even bother to send their investigators out looking for clues or interviewing non-suspects. Nowadays, TV cops are able to force anyone they want into an interrogation room and get them to spill the beans. It’s a lazy and stupid trope of contemporary crime TV and we ought to demand better of our content providers.

Nearly as stupid is the way that cops in contemporary TV shows are able to get search warrants with such ease and speed. This too is nonsense. For about five years, the house next to mine was used as a sort of unofficial halfway house for convicts who were out on parole or recently released from jail. The landlord apparently was making good money by allowing nearly a dozen people at a time to flop in a three-bedroom, one-bathroom house. In fact, she even parked an inoperable van in the driveway and rented it out as well. Needless to say, this was not an ideal situation. I chatted with and liked some of these ex-cons. But some of the cons weren’t exactly ex. There appeared to be a great deal of drug dealing going on next door. This was before weed was legalized in California, and the basement windows were lit up at all hours of the day with bright grow lights. What’s more, in the evenings and late at night, a constant stream of cars would pull up in front of the house next door and wait. Shortly thereafter, someone would come out of the house and make a quick exchange through the car window. Then the car would drive off. Several of the neighbors complained about the situation to the Sacramento Police Department. To its credit, the SPD spent several months observing the house from undercover vehicles parked up the street. At the end of that period, the SPD sent all of the neighbors a report indicating that they had seen plenty of behavior that appeared to be consistent with drug dealing. But the police report also noted that their investigation didn’t yield anywhere near the kind of evidence that would be necessary for them to obtain a warrant to enter the house and search for drugs. It is not easy to obtain a search warrant in America, nor should it be. None of us would want the police to be able to barge into our home simply because a neighbor suspected we might be doing something illegal. (Ultimately, the police advised the concerned neighbors to complain to the City Attorney’s office about the numerous lesser laws that were regularly being blatantly broken by the occupants of the house next door – cars parked on the lawn, late night noise violations, unlawfully operating an auto-painting business in a residential neighborhood, fist fights, fire safety issues, etc. The City Attorney’s office threatened to sue the property’s owner unless all of these issues were dealt with. Whereupon the owner evicted the ex-cons and the house is now rented to a nice young couple with a two-year-old child.)

The above experience illustrated for me just how difficult it is to obtain a search warrant. But even before criminality moved in next door to me, I knew enough people involved in law enforcement – including a few assistant district attorney’s – to know that getting a search warrant isn’t a quick or easy process. But on today’s TV crime shows, you regularly see cops telling suspects – including well-heeled ones like the Winburys – “If you don’t willingly let me come inside and search your house, I’ll be back here in a few hours with a search warrant.” Again, this is just nuts. If the cops want to search your house, you should insist that they get a search warrant first. The cops themselves would probably want to get a warrant. Anything they find in a search would be inadmissible in court if it wasn’t collected lawfully. And any thinking person knows that a cop isn’t going to be able to obtain a search warrant in a matter of hours. They probably wouldn’t be able to get it in a matter of days. Cops don’t actually appeal directly to judges for search warrants. They take their evidence to the district attorney’s office and request that the D.A. present it to a judge and then request a search warrant. This is a long and complicated process. If a cop tells you, “Let me search your house now or I’ll be back with a search warrant in an hour,” he’s lying to you. (I suspect that no real cop ever actually makes this statement.) But even for a TV cop this is a stupid line of dialog. Even stupider is the fact that it often works. Why would a suspect in a murder case let a cop into his house? If he knows that he has incriminating evidence in the house, the obvious response to the cop would be, “Go get the damn warrant.” Even if the suspect has nothing to do with the murder, why would he let the cops go wandering about his house? He may not have committed a murder, but he may have some illegal drug located somewhere in his home. He may have some pornography he doesn’t want the cops to see. He may not have any working smoke detectors in his house – a minor crime but one he could be charged with if he allows the cops unfettered access to his home. Usually, when the police are given a search warrant, its parameters are fairly narrow. The police aren’t allowed to search for any damning piece of evidence they can possibly find. They have to inform the D.A. and the judge of what exactly it is they are looking for in the house. And that is usually all they are allowed to look for. If they are looking for a stolen weapon, they cannot confiscate your marijuana stash. But if you were somehow dumb enough to give the police carte blanche to search your entire house without a warrant, well, god help you. Normally, people that dumb are only found on TV crime dramas.

If any of this sounds as if I am anti-cop, let me dispel that notion right now. I have always been an admirer of police officers in general, just as I admire doctors and teachers and firemen. These are tough jobs and I am grateful for the people who do it well. You may think that I am making this up, but at 6:30 p.m., on September 5, while my wife and I were watching A Perfect Couple in our living room, we were the victims of an attempted home invasion. A homeless drug addict, who had already tried to break into several other homes on our street kicked in the glass panels of our front door, sending shattered glass and splintered wood everywhere and terrifying my wife and I (we are both around 70 years old). We shot up out of our seats and made a beeline towards the back of the house, hoping to escape into a neighbor’s property through our backyard. I was dialing 911 while we did this. But by the time we reached our backdoor, the tweaker had already gone down the side of our property and was climbing over the fence into our backyard. Terrified, we made a u-turn and bolted back through the house and out through our shattered front door. My wife was barefoot and cut up the soles of her feet. We ran across the street to a neighbor’s home and explained the situation. Unbeknownst to us, the police were already on their way, because several neighbors had already reported their own interactions with the junkie. Multiple police cars showed up within minutes of my wife and I exiting the property. Two of the officers were designated to enter the house and look for our intruder. But before doing so, they asked for my permission to enter the property. They also asked me if anyone else other than the intruder might be inside. Naturally, I didn’t not hesitate to allow the police to enter my home. But I point out the fact that they asked for my permission just to show you that real cops are extremely careful about venturing into private property without some sort of authorization. And it is unfair that TV cop shows routinely portray the cops as being very cavalier when it comes to entering private premises. These cops had no idea what they would find inside my home. My house is small – 1235 square feet – but they spent forty minutes looking through every square inch of it. When they finally allowed us back into the house, every closet door was open and the door to the basement we never use was also opened. They had checked under the bed and behind every piece of furniture. What’s more, while they had been searching the house, their colleagues had actually caught the would-be intruder on a neighboring street, where he had gone to continue looking for a house he could rob in order to make some money to buy drugs.

Needless to say this was an extremely unnerving experience. But it was made infinitely less traumatic than it could have been by the bravery and professionalism of the SPD. They took statements from numerous witnesses. The SPD sent a CSI photographer to our house to photograph the damage to the door. They provided me with a police report number that I could use when dealing with my homeowners insurance company. The police drove me to where the suspect had been apprehended, so that I could identify him as my intruder. And they followed up the next day with several text messages identifying the suspect and providing me with additional information.

All of the SPD officers I have ever interacted with have been consummate professionals (this does not include the overzealous officer who interrogated the 17-year-old mentioned above, but I had no direct interaction with him). I suspect that most police officers are pretty damn good at their jobs. And that is why it burns my biscuits when I see cops portrayed on TV shows such as A Perfect Couple as buffoons, authoritarians, or both. It is highly ironic that I happened to be watching A Perfect Couple just as I found myself in the midst of a frightening police emergency. But that is exactly what happened.

And now one final complaint about A Perfect Couple. As an avid reader and a largely unsuccessful writer, I usually enjoy TV shows, films, and novels featuring fabulously successful pop fiction writers as their main characters. The knowledge that Nicole Kidman’s character was a successful crime writer was one of the things that drew me to A Perfect Couple in the first place. I can generally put up with a lot of phoniness in the way that TV portrays novelists. Even the silly-assed TV show Castle is just fine with me. But the makers of A Perfect Couple seem to have made no real effort to make Greer Garrison Winbury a believable writer. She rarely spends any time actually writing. Her writing room looks like it was curated by someone only vaguely familiar with the writing profession. No one in her household seems to have any interest in her books, or anyone else’s books for that matter. We are told that Greer is the author of 28 phenomenally successful crime novels. But the evidence suggests that her books are more like cozy romance novels with a bit of suspense thrown in. Certainly there are successful romance novelists and cozy mystery novelists to be found in America, but probably none of them live in $40 million mansions in Nantucket. Greer has made the kind of money that only Stephen King, John Grisham, and maybe two or three other living American writers have earned from their writing. This suggests that she is fabulously successful. And yet she spends almost all of A Perfect Couple fretting over the upcoming launch party for next book. Even after it seems clear that Amelia Sacks has soured on the Winbury family and won’t be marrying into it after all, Greer frantically insists that Amelia remain in town long enough to attend the launch party at some local Nantucket venue so as not to give the press the impression that the family is anything less than perfect. This, too, makes almost no sense. For one thing, lavish launch parties are largely irrelevant in the publishing industry. Certainly an author as popular as Stephen King or John Grisham wouldn’t need to host a launch party for each new book. In my experience as a bookstore employee, launch parties are mainly associated with sad little local writers desperate to drum up support for their (usually) self-published books. I’ve attended dozens of such sad affairs and they generally do nothing to influence the success of a book. Perhaps if Greer Winbury’s launch party was scheduled to take place in some high-profile New York venue among a crowd of celebrities, her anxiety about the event would be somewhat more logical. But, no, we actually see the event on screen and it looks like a small event attended mainly by a bunch of Nantucket booklovers. Nothing that happens at the event could possible help or hinder the success of Greer’s book. Think I’m wrong? Quick, name the last time a disastrous launch party sunk a novel written by an author as rich and famous as King or Grisham. It just couldn’t happen. Greer seems to fear that a failed launch party could cost her her family’s vast fortune. But that is just silly. If she has 28 bestsellers in print, nothing is going to cause her to go broke. What with foreign rights, film rights, TV rights, paperback rights, and so forth, an author who has written 28 bestselling books in a row is set for life.

And so there you have it. A Perfect Marriage is a story about the writing life and a murder investigation that appears to have been written by people completely unfamiliar with police work or the publishing industry – or marriage, for that matter. I enjoyed it for all the real estate porn and the beautiful women – Kidman, Fanning, Hewson, Meghann Fahy, etc. – but it is about as stupid as crime TV can get.