Imperfect Women

While we’re skeptical that the twists and turns of Imperfect Women are really going to surprise us, we are curious enough about those twists and turns to keep watching.

“Imperfect Women” is so inept as a human drama and a murder-mystery that it renders its award-winning cast irrelevant.

The series’ ad nauseam repetition, its pat dialogue laying bare its themes and episode titles reaffirming those ideas, feel like a desperate, and ultimately failed, attempt to prove to us — or maybe to itself — that Imperfect Women actually has something enlightening to say.

There is nothing wrong with “Imperfect Women,” but that is neither praise nor criticism. It’s just fine.

While it may not be the next Big Little Lies, Apple TV's Imperfect Women is an addictive thriller with plenty to offer outside its ultimately predictable mystery.

Nancy marries “up.” Both her friends are jealous (Mary, of her money; Eleanor, of her broad-shouldered Kennedy of a man), and they hide their jealousy for years, staying friends with Nancy because it’s to their advantage, but unable to properly support their actual friend because of their envy. There is something to this idea, but this kind of thriller—compellingly watchable as it may be—is a hard place to explore it well.

An unfortunate title for a far-from-perfect show, one that takes a gaudy assortment of talent and delivers a limited series that’s much less than the sum of its parts.

Imperfect Women may not reinvent the murder-mystery format, but it does elevate it through sharply drawn characters and a willingness to let its them be complicated, contradictory, occasionally infuriating, and ultimately compelling.

Despite its lack of originality (or a conclusion worthy of its set-up), those with an unending appetite for sultry and salacious mysteries about BFFs and the shocking skeletons in their closet will undoubtedly eat it up.

Imperfect, then, definitely. But escapist fun enough.

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.

Creator Annie Weisman does know how to keep the pot boiling, but the material, based on a novel, seems obvious and struggles to figure out what it wants to accomplish.

Despite some interesting shifts in point of view that dominate the middle episodes, “Imperfect Women” unfortunately feels like nothing more than expired leftovers. .... One of the worst shows that Apple TV has released.

Eight episodes twist through their backstories, but first we have to wade through a morass of weeping, hugs and gradual suspicion that doesn’t yet feel properly earned.

It's more like an elevated, multi-part Lifetime movie. Still, Washington and Moss manage to bring some real emotional depth and texture to their roles as women on the brink of unraveling. Whenever these two go at each other in a scene, particularly in the second half of the season, they raise each other's game and make us wish the rest of the series could be as compelling as those moments are.

Yes, it gets a little soapy at times, but it's still a satisfying watch because there's an emotional authenticity at its core.

Much of Imperfect Women’s runtime is squandered, wringing these forty-something friends through one plot contrivance to the next.