Anyone who has binged The Perfect Couple – Nicole Kidman’s glossy whodunnit, which is Netflix’s most watched show so far this month – will have many questions. Would you not cancel a book launch days after a murder outside your mansion? Why does Kidman’s brother have a cockney accent? Was it meant to be so ludicrously funny? And the one that’s really making us twitch: what the hell are those opening credits?
The stars perform a flashmob-style dance to Meghan Trainor’s Criminal; awkwardly smiling, spinning and clapping on a beach to on-the-nose lyrics for 32 seconds. Director Susanne Bier insisted on the Saturday Night Fever-inspired number: “I wanted to see all the characters having fun!” No class of acting, though, can hide the cringe eating up each actor. In fact, the cast have revealed to Variety that they set up a WhatsApp group to try to veto it.
“Everyone was on that group saying they didn’t want to do this because we just didn’t understand,” said Meghann Fahy – a woman you’d think it would be impossible to have secondhand embarrassment for. “I don’t think any of us could make sense of doing this choreography in these characters,” added Ishaan Khatter, a trained dancer. “We’re like, ‘Wait where does this fit into the scheme of things? This was not part of the assignment!’” Even Kidman said of her character: “I didn’t feel like Greer would dance.”
They were right to be mortified: the final nail in the coffin was Ben Shephard and Cat Deeley recreating the dance on This Morning.
It’s not the first time actors have complained about their show’s openers: earlier this year, Lisa Kudrow admitted that shooting the fountain titles for Friends was a “nightmare” that took “500 takes of dancing” and caused her to snap at the producers when they handed her the scarf to twirl with. She recalled that when they asked for yet another take, Matthew Perry deadpanned: “One more? OK. Can’t remember a time I wasn’t in a fountain … What, are we wet? In a fountain? What, are we dancing in a fountain?” It was all worth it, of course – that opener quickly became iconic.
Alas, The Perfect Couple’s hasn’t had quite the same cultural effect, but there’s no denying it sticks with you – whether you want it to or not. Is that because it is the worst opening sequence ever made?
There are some serious contenders, starting with Slow Horses – the best drama you’re not watching right now – thanks to Mick Jagger’s painful drawling of his song, Strange Game, while a generic crime montage plays. I recently heard it described as “one of the worst pieces of music ever written barfed into a microphone for 30 seconds”. Another fan told me Jagger “sounds like he’s having a molar extracted”.
It’s also quite incredible how bad Happy Valley’s is. One of the best British TV shows ever made opens with a grainy reel that looks like it was edited by a GCSE media studies student in 2004 (they didn’t update it for the recent return) and is soundtracked by Jake Bugg’s not-so-subtle Trouble Town (“All you’ve got’s your benefits and you’re barely scraping by”).
Similarly, the Strike series features a dull sepia montage of its stars Tom Burke and Holliday Grainger out and about doing detective things (mostly smoking, boozing, crossing roads and wearing coats). It reaches full snooze-fest status thanks to Beth Rowley’s sappy guitar song I Walk Beside You.
Then there are those that never end. You can use the loo, make a cup of tea and take a nap in the time it takes for the titles of blockbuster war drama Masters of the Air to play. It is a whopping 2 minute 20 seconds of swelling orchestral music and sweeping war shots that are lifted from the show then slowed down. Time is money, and Spielberg and Hanks clearly had a lot of it.
The biggest stinker, though, has to be Star Trek Enterprise, which features a take on Rod Stewart’s power ballad Faith of the Heart while spacey things flash across the screen. The song is a mind-boggling choice for the world’s biggest sci-fi series – especially as it had previously soundtracked Robin William’s super sentimental hospital drama Patch Adams. The producers said it was used to mark a new era for the show. Fans hated it.
In the era of binge TV, opening titles have become so annoying to so many that Netflix introduced the “skip titles” button and in 2022 reported that it is pressed 36m times a day to save time and get straight to the show. But terrible titles are actually quite rare. There are some cracking ones at the moment: House of the Dragon follows a majestic tapestry, while The White Lotus’s catchy theme tune became a club floor banger last year.
Curiously, Pachinko has the best opening sequence right now, but it uses a similar idea to The Perfect Couple: in-character actors dance around a pachinko while a pop hit plays (Live for Today, then Wait a Million Years in season two). The key difference is the depth added when it is spliced with historical footage and photos of the actors with their real-life families – it becomes a joyous celebration of survival. Thankfully, they didn’t go with a suggested Rolling Stones song (Slow Horses started a month later).
That said, The Perfect Couple isn’t trying to be anything deep. The cringe dance has won them plenty of TikTok fans and given them something to laugh about on the press tour. And full disclosure: I didn’t skip them once.
• This article was amended on 20 September 2024. The top image on an earlier version showed an image of dancing from the end of The Perfect Couple rather than the title dance.
