HBO’s Weekly Release Schedule Made The Undoing’s Weaknesses Impossible to Ignore

The Undoing opens on a woman who has everything arranged. Grace Fraser, a therapist, lives a life that the show films like a private club — school runs, benefit galas, a husband who tells her she is the only person he has ever loved. Then a violent death opens a chasm under the family, and the six episodes that follow are about watching a woman take apart one life while the cameras keep rolling.

HBO aired The Undoing from October 25 to November 29, 2020. David E. Kelley wrote and produced it, Susanne Bier directed it, and it is based on Jean Hanff Korelitz’s 2014 novel You Should Have Known. Nicole Kidman plays Grace. Hugh Grant plays Jonathan Fraser, her husband. Donald Sutherland plays Franklin Reinhardt. The whole thing runs six episodes, one season, and it was the most-watched show on HBO in 2020.

Trailer, via HBO.

Grace Fraser and the life that gets dismantled

The premise is a good one, and the show knows it. Grace is a therapist, which means she spends her working hours telling other people what they cannot see about their own marriages. Then her own marriage turns out to be the thing she could not see. The synopsis is blunt about it: overnight a chasm opens, a violent death and a chain of terrible revelations follow, and Grace has to dismantle one life and build another for her child and her family.

Kidman is the reason to watch. Critics praised the performances, particularly hers and Grant’s, and that judgment holds. She plays Grace as a woman whose composure is a skill, not a temperament, and the show gets real mileage out of watching that skill fail in public. Grant is doing something cannier. He plays Jonathan as charming in exactly the way that should have been a warning, and the performance is more interesting than the writing around it.

The supporting cast is deep. Lily Rabe plays Sylvia Steinetz, Édgar Ramírez plays Detective Joe Mendoza, Noah Jupe plays Henry Fraser, and Matilda De Angelis plays Elena Alves. Noma Dumezweni plays Haley Fitzgerald, and she arrives late and takes the show with her. Annaleigh Ashford plays Alexis Young, Ismael Cruz Córdova plays Fernando Alves, and Michael Devine plays Detective Paul O’Rourke.

A mystery built on withholding

The show’s central mechanic is delay. Information arrives when the plot needs it, not when a person would find it, and the six-episode structure stretches that delay across a full season. The mystery is not really a whodunit. It is a study of a marriage, and the question the show actually cares about is how much Grace knew and how much she chose not to.

That is a fine question. The problem is pacing. The series has one big turn and a long runway after it, and the middle episodes start to feel like the show is walking to the next reveal rather than living in the present one. Some critics knocked the writing, the pace and the characterization, and those complaints are fair. Characters who should be complicated become functions of the plot. People behave in ways that serve the next scene.

The direction and the look are the show’s strongest technical assets. Bier films New York as a series of clean, cold rooms, and the production design and cinematography drew praise for good reason. Grace’s world is expensive and airless, and the show never has to say so out loud. The surfaces are doing a lot of the arguing.

The record the show set

The numbers are the part of this story that is genuinely unusual. The Undoing was the first HBO show to gain viewership every week over the course of its season. That is not a small thing in an era when most series lose people after the premiere. It was also the biggest American series to launch on Sky in the United Kingdom, beating a record previously held by Game of Thrones, and it finished as the most-watched show on HBO in 2020.

The Undoing was the first HBO show to gain viewership every week over the course of the season

That growth says something about how the show was built. A weekly mystery that withholds its answer is a machine for bringing people back, and HBO had one. The finale is the payoff, and whatever you think of the payoff, the audience showed up to find out.

What the show gets right and what it wastes

Here is the case against The Undoing. It has a six-hour story and it tells it in a way that makes the sixth hour feel like a formality. The writing leans on coincidence and on characters declining to ask obvious questions. Kidman and Grant are giving performances that deserve a sharper script, and the gap between what they are doing and what the pages give them is the show’s real subject, whether it means to be or not.

Here is the case for it. The performances are excellent, the direction is controlled, and the central idea — that a person can be an expert on other people’s blindness and still be blind — is worth six hours. The show is also, at its best, genuinely unnerving. It understands that the scariest thing about a bad marriage is not the violence. It is the years of not looking.

Both cases are true, which is why The Undoing lands where it does. It is a well-made, well-acted, badly paced limited series that got a huge audience and did not entirely earn it. The cast is the reason to start it. The pacing is the reason people will argue about whether the ending was worth the wait.

The detail that matters most is not the mystery. It is that HBO found a weekly model that grew every single week, and then spent it on a show whose last act is its weakest. That is the part worth watching in the industry sense. The show proved the format works. It did not prove the story did.

6.4 of 10.

HBO · Hugh Grant · limited series · Nicole Kidman · The Undoing · TV Review