Nine Perfect Strangers

While it's an addition that doesn’t seem altogether necessary, it does more than enough to justify its existence and is an improvement upon the first season in many ways.

Ultimately, "Sirens" is another casualty of the bloated runtime of a story that should've been a two-hour movie at best. It would've worked better as a tighter, less sprawling piece, and should've focused more on the banality of its subject matter.

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.

We’re still largely “meh” about Nine Perfect Strangers, but the show’s second season is marginally better than its first.

It’s not profound or even heartfelt this time, certainly not even approaching the transformational experience Masha is peddling. It’s more like an evening passing around a bong in a college dorm room and watching cartoons. Fun, but entirely forgettable.

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.

Though the eight episodes are peppered with twists — including one late reveal that feels recycled from season 1 — Nine Perfect Strangers forgot a key ingredient for its storytelling smoothie: Fun.

Issues remain here, whether it’s the lack of punch in its satire of wellness and the elite embracing of quackery or the sheer length of it all (this is yet another show that could have been two episodes shorter, at the least, without losing anything of note.)

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.

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.

The show fails to realize its entertaining potential, relying on lazy twists and annoying conveniences to make weak points about letting go of the past and standing up against rich overlords.