For five of the six epiodes the show varies from pretty good to excellent. Kidman is superb, tension is built, and in best whodunnit style a mysterious death occurs and is followed by all the principle suspects being contained in one space. In this case not a single house, but the island of Nantucket. The mysterious death happens the day before ordinary girl Amelia Sacks is to marry into the wealthy Garrisson-Winbury clan, and the victim is Merrit Monaco, her best friend, maid of honour and a fashion influencer.
The death is capably investigated not just by an out of town state detective, and the local Chief of Police, but also by Amelia - who starts to ferry evidence and information from the Winbury residence to the authorities. As events unfold the secrets of the Garrisson-Winbury's are dragged into the light, the family start to betray each other, a variety of suspects emerge and tensions rise. It all looks set for some kind of spectacular last episode melt-down.
So far so good. There's no reason why this couldn't have been excellent throughout, a kind of star studded version of Death in Paradise, but in the final episode the writers drop the ball badly. If you don't mind a wave of spoilers this Vanity Fair piece summarises the differences between the novel and the series. Watching the finale, none of the changes worked, not the new characters, not the extra backstory, and not the changes to the big reveal. The end result felt kind of flat and contrived. It didn't help that the episode was built around a series of police interiews in which the principle members of the rich and powerful Garrisson-Winbury's all agreed to talk to the police without their lawyers present, something which seems completely out of character, not just for them, but for anyone involved in a murder inquiry.
But now I know how things panned out in the book I can see why the changes were made, I can't imagine the original ending proving more satisfying than the one we got. And, in the end, none of these characters are going to stay with me. Most of them were unpleasant, but none of them were memorably so, or particulalry villainous. The ones who weren't unpleasant were bland, believable, certainly, but not interesting. In the end, I barely cared about them.
TLDR: If you want a stylish murder mystery about rich people on an island, watch Glass Onion instead.