North Stars & Unexpected Personal Connections: A Conversation with ‘The Perfect Couple’ Showrunner Jenna Lamia

One of the everyday realities of entertainment is that a majority of development assignments coming to working writers these days are not ideas that thrill them through and through creatively. Often, they are stories you’d never imagined making, if given a blue sky to dream. Writers find their “way in” arduously, working extra hard to find the positives, in order to be passionate and infectious enough to win the assignment. The genesis of The Perfect Couple, it turns out, is not one of those stories, but the rare occurrence when a creative’s personal proclivities as a reader and their own real life character backstory align. My conversation with Jenna Lamia only confirms how fruitful a creative process can be with the right variables around you.

This interview has been edited for content and clarity.

Anne Marie Boidock: Do you remember when the book originally came to you? Was it a personal, social thing, or a potential assignment?

Jenna Lamia: It was a little bit of both. I am a huge fan of Elin Hilderbrand. I read her books for many years before the book came to me in a work capacity. I read The Perfect Couple in the summer of 2018 as it was meant to be, as a beach read on vacation, and loved it.

A year later, I got an email from Gail Berman who said, ‘I have this book, and I think you might be the right writer to adapt it. I can send it to you if you're at all interested.’ It was one of those great intersections of your pure interest and commerce.

Anne Marie Boidock: Was there a shift for you, going from reading it just as an audience, to a maker? Did you immediately know what your "way in" was?

Jenna Lamia: It was one of those rare instances where I did immediately know what my “way in” was. The book is challenging because it takes place in more than one time period. It's the present, the immediate past and the distant past. I'm a huge fan of the TV show Damages and immediately thought, well, they did that very well. They distinguished between time periods with a color saturation and a camera style.

Tonally, I also saw pretty clearly that this would be a setting that would be seductively rich and that would make you want to go there, with the wardrobe and the props and the colors of summer, and that it would have this undercurrent of a death. I think the one element of the end result that I didn't know from the beginning was that it was going to contain as much humor as it did.

Anne Marie Boidock: It feels like a “beach read” come to life. Your team managed to balance having the pulp and gravitas so well, did you have comps going into the room?

Jenna Lamia: Yes, but not the shows you might expect, because I had not seen The White Lotus or Big Little Lies when I started working on this five years ago. They didn't exist in my head yet. Though, I'm not going to pretend I didn't later experience sheer delight watching The White Lotus and the way David E. Kelley used the talking head interviews in Big Little Lies, which later on in the process became a huge influence.

What I had seen was Damages and Broadchurch. I'm not saying this show ended up anything like those, but I studied them.

Anne Marie Boidock: Were there any characters that you identified with early on, personally, and did that shift after you made it?

Jenna Lamia: Very early on, Celeste (the bride), who ended up being called Amelia. I really related to her, as far as that period of your 20s when you are learning who you are in a relationship by going through different ones with different partners, especially as someone who spent a majority of their 20s living in New York City and dating different guys.

And then, it did shift. I ended up relating to Amelia and Merritt's friendship. It's the love story of the show and the most pure relationship, because in many ways they are one another's family and Merritt really relies on Amelia and her parents to be her village that takes care of her.

Anne Marie Boidock: You have such an acting resume, what do you find helps you moving from that into writing and then showrunning?

Jenna Lamia: I do find that they are so closely related. They all stem from the same love of entertaining people, the same curiosity about what makes others tick. I think it's so important to bring that to your writing, to be curious about what core wound drives someone.

What I can bring as an individual is a sense of humor. Oftentimes I'll find myself pitching in voices. Humor and authenticity are critically important to me in the things I like to watch, and therefore, in the things I like to write. If you're ever stuck, go to those and you may find your way through when a scene just isn't working. I think, in order to survive this life, we really do need a sense of humor.

Anne Marie Boidock: Did you have any North Stars when you started making this? Like, if we can't execute X element, this house of cards will fall?

Jenna Lamia: As far as the things that I felt like we had to get right or the whole thing would crumble... Number one was the location, because I'm from New England myself. My mom is from Maine. My aunt is a lobster woman. I've spent a lot of my life in that topography and around those accents, and I've seen it done not quite right so many times. Now, this isn't a working class show, but there's an authenticity to the tattered wealth that you see on Nantucket. That was part of every early meeting I had, and my first phone call with Elin as well, that I really wanted to get Nantucket right as far as the way people display their wealth and the way they don't.

They don't wear flashy labels. They don't drive Lamborghinis around the island. They drive old Jeeps that they leave there all year round. They wear these Nantucket red pants that fade with every wash. And you can tell a real Islander by how faded their Nantucket red pants are. They're not a bright red, they're a faded, sun-bleached, salmon color. That was the thing I had to convince Susanne [Bier] about. The pants.

Luckily, our amazing costume designer, Signe Sejlund, did so much research and was incredible as far as getting it right. In the end, Netflix really ponied up on the locations, and we were able to shoot in Cape Cod just across the sound from Nantucket, and get a lot of B-roll from Nantucket itself. I will always be grateful for that.

I had conversations with Susanne early on about the things that I felt were of critical importance as far as authenticity goes. She really is a human divining rod for the truth. She sniffs out bullshit in a printed script, in a performance, and she just doesn't let you get away with it. I think that's why actors trust her implicitly, because she's not going to let them have a false moment. She did the same thing for me as a writer.

Anne Marie Boidock: Some creatives, when they're adapting, like to stay very close with the writer, and some like to be bifurcated. What was your process like?

Jenna Lamia: That was dictated by Elin, who is incredibly savvy about this process. We spoke on the phone a few times before I started writing, and once she realized she could trust me as far as getting Nantucket right, once she heard my authentic love for the book, she said, 'I write the novels, you write the screenplays. Go do your thing. I'm so excited. Let me know if you need anything, and I'm just here as your cheerleader.' There's no better gift than that. So, she and I had this separation of church and state throughout the whole process. It was not just kind but really smart of her.

The Perfect Couple is now available on Netflix.