'Imperfect Women' Bombshell: Biggest Debates, Changes From Book
Leslie Odom, Jr. and Kerry Washington in 'Imperfect Women'
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[This article contains spoilers from episodes one and two of Imperfect Women.]
Apple TV doesn’t waste time showing audiences why its latest series, which debuted with its first two episodes on March 18, is titled Imperfect Women. In the first scene of the pilot episode featuring the show’s main characters, Eleanor (Kerry Washington), Nancy (Kate Mara) and Mary (Elisabeth Moss), Nancy reveals to Eleanor that she’s been having an affair — a secret she keeps from Mary and one of many more to be exposed among the trio of longtime friends over the course of eight episodes.
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It’s Nancy’s murder early in episode one that leads to an unraveling of trust and a sowing of discord between nearly every character, from Mary and Eleanor and Eleanor and her brother Donovan (Leslie Odom Jr.) to Nancy’s husband Robert (Joel Kinnaman) and their daughter Cora (Audrey Zahn), as audiences try to solve the mystery of who killed the former dancer who grew up on the wrong side of the tracks yet found herself married to a wealthy heir among the individuals at the center of the story.
“We want everyone to keep guessing,” showrunner Annie Weisman, who adapted Araminta Hall’s novel of the same name for TV, tells The Hollywood Reporter. “As you’re getting to know and love and be seduced by each of these characters and these fabulous performances, we still, at the end of the episode, want to give you that feeling of, Wait a minute, I’m not sure what’s true anymore.”
The second episode, titled “Crush,” accomplishes that goal when Eleanor sleeps with Robert, a choice less rooted in ill-managed grief but rather a decades-long harboring of romantic feelings for her best friend’s husband, which calls into question not only each of their character but also potential motives for wanting Nancy out of the picture.
Below, Weisman talks about the gamble of having Robert and Eleanor cross the line so early in the series, moving the setting of the show from its initial location of England to L.A., the addition of Odom’s character, which wasn’t in the original book, and why they designed the series as limited: “We wanted it to be a really satisfying ending … we wanted to land in a place where you feel like you know what happens.”
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Araminta Hall is an executive producer on this series. How involved was she in scripting and production?
She really gave us free rein. She said, “Best of luck to you, I can’t wait to see it on the air” — which was a thrilling amount of freedom and a great deal of trust. We were all huge fans of the book, so we wanted to preserve a lot of what she set up: the structure of her storytelling, the different perspectives she laid out, the distinctiveness of the characters. But then we had an opportunity to adapt it to an American setting — a Southern California setting. And in doing that, we really wanted to honor the specificity of the world and the culture we live in here. So we also needed a little freedom to adapt and stretch out.
Where had you been thinking about setting the location as you first began adapting the book, and how early was the decision for Los Angeles made?
When I first started working on it, I thought very creatively of setting it in New England because it’s [originally] England. I was thinking about Boston and the world around there, and I had originally scripted it that way. But when Kerry Washington joined the team, she was really adamant about shooting here in Los Angeles, so we pivoted. And that was really exciting because she felt so strongly about it. She really got us on board and had the clout to make that happen.
I’m a native Southern Californian. I love stories in Southern California. I love talking about and highlighting communities in Los Angeles that people don’t always know about that are not the typical cliché. And we got a chance to do that here. We also got a chance to work in L.A. after the strikes and the fires and put together a big production here at a time when the town really needed it. So it was a great opportunity.
Elizabeth Moss, Kerry Washington and Kate Mara in Imperfect Women.
Apple TV+
Were there any other big changes with characters? Anyone new who wasn’t in the book