The Undoing

Sky Atlantic/now TV, Mondays, 9pm

he Undoing oozes class. It’s created by David E Kelley, the writer of glossy saga Big Little Lies, and directed by Susanne Bier, of The Night Manager fame. It’s set among the Manhattan elite of doctors, lawyers and therapists – people with massive marble-topped islands in their vast kitchens. It’s made by HBO, the unrivalled home of sophisticated television. And it stars A-listers Nicole Kidman and Hugh Grant, for heaven’s sake. It’s an elite project all round. Yet, it’s also total nonsense.

The story revolves around that hoary old cliché of the seemingly perfect family who have Dark Secrets hidden beneath their veneer of wealth, privilege, finely-tailored togs and witty banter. Specifically, Hugh Grant’s celebrated paediatric oncologist disappears just as a new acquaintance of his writer/therapist wife (Kidman) is found

Tbrutally murdered. The victim turns out to be the mother of a boy from Hugh and Nicole’s son’s private school. Could lovely, wryly charming and rich Hugh really have anything to do with this woman’s death? That’s the central question of the six-hour serial, which is half whodunnit and half courtroom drama, and there’s not much more to it than that. You might think it’s going to turn into a Big Little Lies-style interrogation of class, race, misogyny and privilege. But it never does. Instead, it’s a shallow, empty affair. And I enjoyed it tremendously. Kidman and Grant are as gloriously charismatic as ever, and they’re joined by a fine supporting cast, including the legendary Donald Sutherland, whose speech about “cocksuckers” in a later episode is worth tuning in for alone. As high-gloss tosh goes, The Undoing is hard to beat.

The Britbox revival of the puppet-based satire comes to ITV next Saturday for a special episode to get us in the mood for Trump vs Biden in the US Presidential Election. ITV, Saturday 31 October, 10pm