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CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
11
Mixed:
31
Negative:
6
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Critic Reviews
Aug 9, 2021
Season 1 Review:
Nine Perfect Strangers excels in balancing its incredible ensemble cast. Every performance in the series is well-acted and thoroughly engaging. ... Nine Perfect Strangers edges out The White Lotus, particularly in the writing of its characters, providing more depth and a far more compelling group of individuals.
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Aug 10, 2021
Season 1 Review:
An ensemble that both highlights these characters’ strengths and humanizes their weaknesses. Leading the charge is Nicole Kidman in a role practically designed for her. ... The result is a show that’s as addicting and delightfully soapy as HBO’s summer hit The White Lotus.
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TV Guide MagazineAug 27, 2021
Season 1 Review:
This eight-part melodrama never quite settles in a tone, in part because the clientele is such a mixed bag of soap opera cliches. ... Strangers, with its hallucinatory trippiness, is more about the surreal. [30 Aug - 12 Sep 2021, p.14]
Aug 17, 2021
Season 1 Review:
With a mini-reunion of key players from "Big Little Lies" at its core, Nine Perfect Strangers combines a book by Liane Moriarty with Nicole Kidman and writer-producer David E. Kelley, then surrounds them with an equally impressive cast. The series is another one of those riddles wrapped in a mystery, managing to pique interest while remaining stingy about disgorging big truths, much less little lies.
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Aug 12, 2021
Season 1 Review:
David E. Kelley, the busy scripter who can go as high (“The Practice”) as he can go low (“The Crazy Ones”); “Nine Perfect Strangers” (co-written with John-Henry Butterworth) falls somewhere in the middle of his reach, at times lifted to the upper-middle by the performances. Watching this set of actors submit to Masha’s smoothies is a lot of fun, as is their obligation to go “forest bathing,” forgo cellphones, and explore their most tender emotional depths.
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Aug 9, 2021
Season 1 Review:
The ensemble is large enough that if one isn’t particularly engaged by the character on-screen, one simply has to wait five minutes for the weather to change. ... One wishes for more Kidman: Not a bigger performance, which seems impossible, but one that more firmly holds the show’s center. ... While we may crave more Masha, there’s interest, still, in watching characters place themselves in her thrall.
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Aug 13, 2021
Season 1 Review:
While there is a sameness to all three of Kidman’s most recent TV/streaming projects, there’s no denying they’re addictive soaps. “Nine Perfect Strangers” benefits tremendously from Hall playing against type and the presence of McCarthy, who is so good in dramatic roles that she ought to consider passing on more of the blah comedies she’s starred in of late.
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The PlaylistAug 9, 2021
Season 1 Review:
Experience “Nine Perfect Strangers” is as an appreciation of a perfect cast. Looking deeper than that reveals its flaws. It lacks the mystery or social commentary of something like “The White Lotus” (another Summer 2021 hit about damaged people on a beautiful vacation) but the people gathered here find enough truthful grace notes about the human condition to justify the trip.
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LooperMay 22, 2025
The TimesMay 21, 2025
Season 2 Review:
The pacing, at times, can also feel as glacial as the setting. Still, as Masha, Kidman skilfully navigates a fine line between predator and victim, a manipulator who is also vulnerable. .... The reveals coming via the slow unsheathing of the strangers’ emotional carapaces that transforms at least some of them from formula to flesh.
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RogerEbert.comMay 20, 2025
The GuardianAug 18, 2021
Season 1 Review:
The plot is just chewy enough for its eight-hour length, and the emotional stakes are reassuringly low. In a world of increasingly appalling, fast-moving headlines, it may be the perfect time to release a drama that doesn’t move like a whirlwind nor feel too convincing.
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May 22, 2025
Season 2 Review:
This efficient, if somewhat rushed, five-episode limited series also wants to get serious about heavy subjects, and the two tones don’t just clash but magnetically repel one another into different dimensions. I appreciate the effort to make characters and their relationships complex, but it can play out like a parade of dissociative identity disorders.
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Aug 19, 2021
Season 1 Review:
The series, as it cycles through satire, horror, and prestige psychodrama, can’t quite decide whether the wellness industry is a virulent scam or a desperately needed curative for broken souls. ... Nine Perfect Strangers connects only occasionally with its characters as human beings.
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Aug 18, 2021
Aug 18, 2021
Season 1 Review:
"Nine Perfect Strangers" is a clumsy star-driven project that, scene to scene, is never quite sure what it is. ... Hopefully there's an answer tucked into the final episodes, which were not provided for review. Whether or not you care enough to stick around that long, that's another story.
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Aug 18, 2021
Season 1 Review:
Kelley and the "Nine" writers struggle to fit everything they want to say and do into the episodes. Clunky exposition, hazy flashbacks, excessive nudity and drug-induced drama do not make up for a lack of confidence and clarity in storytelling. And despite the best efforts of the cast, particularly Cannavale, Boone and Jacinto, the dialogue often falls flat in their mouths.
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Aug 18, 2021
Season 1 Review:
The show’s emotional epiphanies and dark twists are meant to really mean something. But it all tumbles out of the actors’ mouths in predetermined paragraphs, ones that speak to pain and regret and loss in broad generalizations. ... There is detail there, jumping off the pages of a pitch document. But in the execution, everything gets flattened into a bland statement about angry Americans whose modernity, self-involvement, and defensive crouches have alienated them from their true selves.
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Aug 17, 2021
Season 1 Review:
It’s certainly watchable — with that ensemble and such an alluring setting (it takes place in California but was filmed in bucolic Byron Bay in New South Wales, Australia), watchability is practically guaranteed. But somehow the show manages to feel too contrived and too thinly conceived at the same time.
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Aug 17, 2021
Season 1 Review:
Though the show’s tone veers dramatically depending on who is at the center of a scene, the individual performances are fun and lively enough to frequently cover up how hollow the whole endeavor feels. But Masha is a big problem. ... She is meant to be a mystery with a human being underneath, but only the former part comes across, which becomes frustrating the longer it takes to establish what Masha really wants.
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Aug 17, 2021
Season 1 Review:
It’s a surprisingly wobbly, not-good performance from a great actress in a beautifully photographed and occasionally entertaining but mostly ridiculous and off-putting melodrama from some of the same folks (series co-developer David E. Kelley and author Liane Moriarty) who gave us “Big Little Lies.”
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Sep 5, 2025The GuardianMay 21, 2025
Season 2 Review:
In the absence of any satirical intent (there is no White Lotus-ish commentary on the gullibility or self-indulgence of the rich, or the sprawling grift that is the wellness industry, which even the first season mustered from time to time), it feels just too insubstantial to be worth eight hours of anyone’s time.
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The TelegraphAug 19, 2021
Season 1 Review:
It could all have been so much better. The ensemble cast is great. ... But in episode two, nothing happens, and the show carries on this way. Only six of the eight episodes were made available for review, so perhaps the last two are a triumph. By that point, though, you’ll most likely have checked out.
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RogerEbert.comAug 18, 2021
Season 1 Review:
The series has a dangerously low amount of stakes, as it slogs between so many different storylines that just hold the series’ curious evolution back. ... The story is tediously more driven by star power than it is narrative, and while that set-up has some hold, it doesn’t make large chunks particularly memorable, or tense. ... Their characters are of course flawed but don’t seem all that nuanced beyond a secret that eventually comes out.
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Aug 16, 2021
Season 1 Review:
The protocol is one of the few story elements that provide any tension. ... Masha is one of the [Kidman]’s more flamboyant incarnations, and one of the wackier, but it can generate only so much fascination in a story intent on inducing disbelief and disengagement. ... One character asks another, having just enjoyed an audience with Masha. “Suffering,” comes the response. Viewers should take heed.
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Aug 9, 2021
Season 1 Review:
The cast of Nine Perfect Strangers is too good for the limited series to ever be unwatchable. But after seeing six of eight hour-long episodes, I’m pretty sure the biggest mystery has nothing to do with any of the damaged characters; it’s whether anybody involved realized that, by virtue of sheer bad timing, the thematically anemic show would inevitably be reduced to White Lotus for Dummies. ... It doesn’t help that the performances feel like they’re coming from at least a half-dozen different shows.
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The Daily BeastMay 19, 2025
Season 2 Review:
The series gestures at using its wealthy ensemble to lampoon cultural discourse, whether it be the half-hearted fallout of “cancel culture” or the pitfalls of millennials embracing therapy speak without reflecting on their personal trauma. But after a few episodes, it falls away in favor of cloying, unearned epiphanies.
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The Daily BeastAug 20, 2021
Season 1 Review:
Over the course of three episodes, the circuitous narrative amounts to the guests wondering, on a seemingly never-ending loop, “Why are we here?” ... Three hours into the show, I do not know why they are there, but I did stop caring about the answer in about half that time. It doesn’t help that the performances are all over the place. ... The story is so underwritten that no amount of Kidman’s signature eye-twitch acting could hypnotize you into caring.
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Aug 16, 2021
Season 1 Review:
The series’ raison d'etre is its reveals what the characters divulge about their histories and what Masha is doing to them without their knowledge. Unfortunately, nearly every one of these reveals is gimmicky, uninteresting or both; the effect is less a melting of hearts than the click of puzzle pieces falling into place. ... [Kidman's Masha] feels increasingly generic as the series chugs along, flattening from a female Keith Raniere to a life-size cardboard cutout of him.
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IndieWireAug 18, 2021
Season 1 Review:
Performers like Shannon, Hall, and Cannavale do their damnedest to imbue grace and nuance where they can, but they’re constantly hamstrung by simplistic backstories and choices that prioritize plot over logic. ... “Nine Perfect Strangers” gives its audience no reason to invest in the retreat as a one-of-a-kind locale, its subjects as human beings with agency, or its greater purpose as anything other than a fancy vacation for its famous creators.
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