74 THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER16, 2020
ON TELEVISION
BASIC INSTINCTS
“The Undoing” on HBO.
BY NAOMIF RY
ILLUSTRATION BY FRÉDÉRIC RÉBÉNA
I
n an early scene of the HBO drama
“The Undoing,” Grace Fraser, played
by Nicole Kidman, arrives at the pala-
tial Manhattan apartment of one of the
other mothers from her son’s private
school. She is there to take part in a
planning session for a school fund-raiser,
a meeting that devolves into a bitch
sesh quicker than anyone can say “clas-
sic eight.” “Did you see the David Hock-
neys?” one woman asks, referring to the
home of apparently even-richer school
parents, where the fund-raiser is set to
take place. “Two of them, on facing walls
in the dining room,” another mom an-
swers, as a uniformed maid serves tea.
Like “Big Little Lies,” with which it
shares David E. Kelley as creator, “The
Undoing” has great fun telegraphing the
signifiers of wealth. The former show,
set in the casual luxury of Monterey, was
full of crackling fire pits, double-height
living rooms, and rustic decks overlooking
expanses of pristine shoreline. Here, we
get full-bore Upper East Side resplen-
dence, where cashmere-clad, preternatu-
rally smooth-complexioned women con-
vene in marble-and-gilt rooms so laden
with precious objets that they could dou-
ble as the Met’s Wrightsman Galleries.
The fund-raiser these women are
working on will solicit money for the
school’s diversity efforts, to cover tuition
for students who are neither rich nor
white. The mother of one such student
has joined the planning committee. Her
name is Elena Alves, and, although she
is played by the Italian actress Matilda
De Angelis, the show uses establishing
shots of Elena’s apartment in Spanish
Harlem to suggest that her character is
Latina. Elena has ostensibly come to the
meeting to help, but the awkwardness
her presence arouses suggests these rich
white mothers’ allegiance to what Dick-
ens once called “telescopic philanthropy,”
the kind of benevolence that, tinged by
racism and classism, works best from a
safe distance. In the scene’s climax, the
ladies are both horrified and titillated
when Elena drops her top to begin nurs-
ing her infant daughter at the table, like
a sensual Madonna. “Spectacular breasts,”
Grace’s friend Sylvia (Lily Rabe) says
later, snickering.
“The Undoing” is not subtle, which
at first I didn’t mind. The pilot episode
hit the exact pleasure center between mild
critique and life-style porn. Grace is a
successful therapist and the daughter of
a leonine billionaire (Donald Sutherland);
her husband, Jonathan (Hugh Grant), is
a pediatric oncologist who has been fea-
tured in New York magazine’s “Best Doc-
tors” issue. As I began watching, the show
seemed well positioned to skewer its sub-
jects while allowing the viewer to revel
in the flashier aspects of their lives—a
“Primates of Park Avenue” for the city’s
eleventh-hour pre-pandemic moment.
But, much like the appearance of a
soothsaying gypsy in a Victorian novel,
the mysterious Elena, with her provoc-
ative air and accented English, portends
the switch from light satire to melo-
drama. At the fund-raiser—just after a
glass of water has been auctioned off for
a thousand dollars, as a show of the par-
ents’ commitment to the cause—Elena
decides to go home early. The next morn-
ing, she is found dead, bludgeoned by a
hammer in her studio. (She is, appar-
ently, an artist, though this detail remains
abstract, as does almost everything else
about the character.) Jonathan is arrested;
it turns out that he was having an affair
with Elena, who might have become ob-
sessed with him after he treated her older
child for cancer, and circumstantial evi-
dence has made him the main suspect
in the case. He is also unable to afford a
lawyer—he emptied his coffers while
The show explores the psyche of a high-strung, upper-class white woman. wooing Elena. “Your husband is a bit of
