Nicole Kidman is known for interesting film roles, so why is her TV work so disappointing?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/tv/2021/08/18/nicole-kidman-tv-roles/
From Big Little Lies to The Undoing to Nine Perfect Strangers, "it’s increasingly hard not to notice the disjunct between the productive openness that drives Kidman the film actor and the cautious awards-baiting (and diminishing returns) that define Kidman the TV star," says Inkoo Kang. On the big screen, Kang says, Kidman's directors have been a "'who’s who' of boldface-named filmmakers: Stanley Kubrick, Nora Ephron, Anthony Minghella, Aaron Sorkin, Gus Van Sant, Lee Daniels, Jane Campion, Noah Baumbach, Sofia Coppola, Werner Herzog, Park Chan-wook, Yorgos Lanthimos and Lars von Trier. It’s tempting, then, to attribute the stultifying homogeneity of Kidman’s more recent TV roles to her sudden timidity regarding her collaborators. Creator David E. Kelley’s Big Little Lies marked a turning point in Kidman’s genre-agnostic, typecast-resistant trajectory. As Celeste, the patrician wife of a charming but violent husband (played by Alexander Skarsgard) and mother to two small boys, Kidman revealed layer after layer of fragility, terror and repression, as her character came to terms with the physical abuse she’d tried for years to excuse and the grim possibility of her sons learning to normalize their father’s roughness with their mother. It was a showstopping performance, especially in Kidman’s therapy scenes with Robin Weigert, as well as an Emmy-deserving turn. Disappointingly, Kidman followed up with another Kelley series, The Undoing, in which she hardly stretched as the patrician wife of a charming but violent husband (this time played by Hugh Grant) and mother to a young son. Though The Undoing was a ratings hit for HBO, its creative failures are reflected in the lack of Emmy nominations for both Kidman and the miniseries itself, though Grant did receive a nod for his role as a slippery megalomaniac. While the true nature of Kidman’s spiritual teacher, Masha, on Kelley and John Henry Butterworth’s Nine Perfect Strangers is initially withheld, the more details we learn about her, the less she appears the exotic rare bird that’s initially suggested and more the familiar blend of affluence, violence, self-suppression and threatened motherhood...Kidman may well love collaborating with Kelley, and these recurring themes and milieus just might be the ones that speak most to her. But her current doldrums do feel like a waste of her chameleonic talents, as well as of her star power to get approved under-the-radar projects that don’t already have a TV legend’s name attached. And if she regrets the decline in reputation that her all-over-the-place approach got her — she currently has nine films with a Rotten Tomatoes score of 30 percent or less — the prudence doesn’t seem to be doing her any favors, either. But it also feels uncharitable to solely blame Kidman and Kelley when misfires like The Undoing and Nine Perfect Strangers reflect not just individual artists’ choices, but the calcifying tropes of 'prestige TV.'"