Standing out among the mass of content uploaded to Netflix each week, Sirens has drawn comparisons to A Perfect Couple, the Clue-style series released in fall 2024 that starred Nicole Kidman as a successful writer concerned with appearances. Both series are set on a New England island, feature similarly upscale interiors and center on a bourgeois couple made up of a powerful woman married to an evasive man.

With the characters Michaela and Peter Kell, Julianne Moore and Kevin Bacon offer a convincing alternative to Nicole Kidman and Liev Schreiber, and both series even cast Meghann Fahy in two very similar roles. In A Perfect Couple, Fahy played a reluctant witness killed on the eve of a wedding; in Sirens, she plays Devon. A young woman from a poor background, Devon comes searching for her sister Simone (Milly Alcock), who works as an assistant for Michaela, in hopes of convincing her to return to Buffalo to care for their elderly, dementia-stricken father.

As if leafing through a home décor magazine, viewers spend the entire first episode waiting for the discovery of a body somewhere in the halls of the Kell residence, where the household staff are busily preparing, at summer's end, for a gala supporting the protection of birds of prey. But that moment never comes. Instead, only the memory of a vanished first wife and the enigmatic presence of Michaela, who seems to hold an unhealthy sway over Simone, loom over the Kell estate.

You have 48.49% of this article left to read. The rest is for subscribers only.