On TV, Having Wealth Means You Get to Suffer Beautifully

Like Big Little Lies and other shows about flawed people of means, The Undoing soon punctures its protagonists’ facade to critique their many privileges. The morning after a school fundraiser, a young financial-aid student at Reardon discovers that his mother, a working-class artist named Elena Alves (Matilda De Angelis), has been murdered. When Jonathan disappears following Elena’s death, he becomes the lead suspect. In its retracing of the Frasers’ relationship with Elena, and its depiction of her murder trial, The Undoing reminds viewers that the family’s wealth gives them extraordinary power. No matter how much chaos they sow, or how much they suffer emotionally, the Frasers and their world remain unblemished—a fact that makes the story aesthetically satisfying but morally queasy. Thrillers and prestige series have never been paragons of ethical behavior. But The Undoing’s glossy tale is an uneasy fit for a time when the real-life rich continue to line their pockets, and the less fortunate work to sustain their employers’ glitzy lifestyle and die in record numbers.

The Undoing leans into the opulence that makes it so compulsively (and frustratingly) watchable. The series seems to be under the spell of the alluring world it depicts. Even the sites where its characters agonize are beautiful: Early on, Grace seeks refuge at her family’s beach house; later, she weeps in her father’s marble-studded Upper East Side castle. These settings are immaculate, the details a baroque feast. Father and daughter meet in museum halls; they strategize over intricate chessboards. But as the show unravels, the threat the Frasers pose to others becomes starker. Directed by Bird Box’s Susanne Bier, The Undoing is visually jittery when the camera moves from the pristine scenery to the characters themselves; blurred shots and repeated close-ups convey a sense of unease. That impending horror never fully destabilizes the Frasers themselves, though, or their affluent peers.

Indeed, the show seems to relish the disorder that the Frasers cause in other people’s lives, the pain they mete out. Throughout it all, the family remains static: glamorous, somehow still in control. In this, The Undoing deviates from—and falls short of—productions such as HBO’s Succession and Rian Johnson’s whodunit, Knives Out, which don’t spare the prosperous families at their center from shame and degradation. These works skewer the uber-wealthy, in part, by subjecting the rich to indiscriminate terrors, including insects and lesions and reflexive vomiting. As my colleague Megan Garber wrote of Succession’s bodily horrors, “The show counters hubris with humiliation. Its wealthy world is full of rot.”

Read: Rian Johnson turned the whodunit on its head in ‘Knives Out’

For viewers tired of extreme wealth inequality, seeing rich people subjected to the same natural forces as everyone else can be perversely entertaining. But The Undoing’s monied families are never debilitated in such a visceral manner. As they attempt to claw their way out of a nasty situation, their disgusting acts accumulate. In one brief fight scene, Jonathan nearly bites off the finger of a man who attacks him, and spits out a thick stream of blood. Describing a different misdeed, Jonathan explains his actions by admitting simply, “I was a mess.”