Nine Perfect Strangers

The wife and I were looking for something new to watch, and stumble across Nine Perfect Strangers on Hulu. It's based on a novel by Liane Moriarty and created for TV by John-Henry Butterworth & David E. Kelley. I expect a good show when I see Kelley involved, but I wasn't sure about Butterworth until I looked up his credits. He has written one of my favorite Tom Cruise movies, Edge of Tomorrow and wrote the script for Ford V. Ferrari.

The premise of this 6-part miniseries: Nine stressed city dwellers visit a boutique health-and-wellness resort that promises healing and transformation. The resort's director is a woman on a mission to reinvigorate their tired minds and bodies.

As a child of the 80s, I'm a sucker for a good ensemble mini-series. This cast delivers. Even the actress I'm not a fan of ... I'm looking at you Nicole Kidman, was perfect in her role. It's funny, sad, tense, thoughtful, and entertaining. I paused it more than once so we could discuss not only what was going on but how we might approach or react in different scenarios.

These 3 are the main people behind the wellness resort, and could have been the focus of the entire series with their backstories, interactions with each other, and issues.

The 9 strangers are filled with familiar faces, but I gravitated to 3 of the characters: Napoleon, Tony, and Frances.

I'd watch Michael Shannon read labels and probably be moved, but Bobby Cannavale is no slouch in the acting department. His character's journey is just as emotional as any of the others, and he shows you a vulnerability that pushes past all the noise he makes to distract you from all his issues. I always enjoy Melissa McCarthy but I find her more restrained roles to be her best. She's funny, but sometimes her acting chops gets lost in her comedy.

The rest of the cast is great, and they help make the journeys of the above 3 that much better.

While this isn't a horror series, it does offer us a peak inside a collection of broken and fragile people looking for that "thing" to help them rediscover what makes life worth living. And isn't that scary enough?