It's official: The Perfect Couple is the crime drama of the year for Netflix

The Perfect Couple is the biggest Netflix TV show based on a crime novel since Fool Me Once, a show that only just squeaked its way into 2024.

The first week viewing figures for The Perfect Couple are out, and are even stronger than we’d have guessed.

Netflix subscribers spent a collective 103.5 million hours watching the show during its first four days on streaming. That’s equivalent to 20.3 million people watching the entire run back-to-back.

It has been quite a while since any Netflix show hit this big, if we take the recent return of Bridgerton out of the equation, anyway.

Avatar pipped its first-week figures in February, as did Griselda in January. But it’s been more than half a year since a new show drew in the crowds like The Perfect Couple.

Much like this year’s biggest hit so far, Fool Me Once, The Perfect Couple is an adaptation of a twisty beach-ready read, a novel by Elin Hilderbrand.

Nicole Kidman and Live Schreiber star as a couple, the heads of a rich family looking forward to the wedding of their son, set to happen on the beautiful Nantucket coast.

But when a body turns up on the beach, and it’s the main of honour, attention is turned to who actually killed her.

This is quite the electric start to Elin Hilderbrand’s career as an author of big-screen adaptations.

There could be more to come. Hilderbrand has written, by our count, 31 books since 2000.

Her TV-adjacent career was meant to start quite a bit earlier, though. In 2021 it was announced ABC was developing an adaptation of the first book in her “Paradise” trilogy, Winter in Paradise. But we haven't heard much of it since.

Like The Perfect Couple and, it seems, just about all of Hilderband’s work, Winter in Paradise is partly set in Nantucket. Perhaps it’s time for Netflix to get a Nantucket section to match its numerous (well, eight) Harlan Coben adaptations.

• Best crime dramas on Netflix