“The Perfect Couple” does walk down a crime-solving aisle many mysteries have traveled before, but this one does it with so much class and sass you just won’t care.

The Perfect Couple is operating so well on its own bizarro wavelength, with over-the-top performances, melodramatic dialogue, and sharply satirical characterizations of the ultrawealthy that make it feel tonally distinct — especially as it lacks the sympathy and sermonizing so many other series of this type labor under. Instead, The Perfect Couple has a tongue-in-cheek singularity that helps its episodes slide by.

Easy breezy summer thrillers and self-aware melodrama work best when everyone understands the assignment at hand and from the jump — from the very first note of that Meghan Trainor song — The Perfect Couple reveals it knows exactly what it's doing.

Disappointingly, going by the first four episodes of The Perfect Couple, it’s a tad soft-boiled. For this sort of thing to work, as with The White Lotus, the script has to be dagger-sharp, merciless. When that attitude isn’t there in the writing, you sense timidity.

The Perfect Couple has all the soapy twists you could want from an easily digestible binge-fest and it’s graciously short compared to most. But a mansion full of horny, caustic millionaires has been done better elsewhere.

It’s complication for complication’s sake, basically window dressing for a show that boils down to the idea that rich people are weird. Now there’s still some joy in watching but you’ll have to decide if you like Nicole Kidman enough to spend six hours with these terrible people.

“The Perfect Couple” has a thesis no one buys into, a dated grasp of media and scandal in the 2020s and characters that are more cartoons than flesh and blood folks with foibles. It’s a TV version of a bad “beach book,” making one wish one had spent these six hours doing something else, preferably on a beach.