When adapting a book for television, a smart choice may be devoting episodes to different characters’ points of view. It allows the viewers to experience familiar events through different eyes. Audiences can learn about characters’ motivations that might otherwise have to be spouted at length or remain forever opaque. So Annie Weisman is on theoretically solid ground in adapting Araminta Hall’s novel Imperfect Women by giving blocks of episodes over to her three lead protagonists.

Unfortunately, things often go awry in the transition from hypothetical to concrete. And so it does here.

A huge part of the problem, one that the series can never make up for, is that the first set of episodes goes to Kerry Washington’s Eleanor. It makes sense. Eleanor is the one friend Nancy (Kate Mara) appears most honest with, including admitting to an extramarital affair. That last bit is especially provocative since Eleanor introduced Nancy to her future husband, Robert (Joel Kinnaman). On top of that, Eleanor really wanted Robert for herself. Under pressure and assumptions from her family, as represented here by her brother Donovan (Leslie Odom Jr.), she offered him up to her friend instead.

(There’s no place to put this, but I must now mention that Donovan mostly dresses like he’s trying to bring back the 2022 microtrend of a suit with no shirt. Or perhaps, if you include the haircut, he’s throwing it back to Bobby Brown circa the 17th Annual American Music Awards?  Fashion choices aside, Odom makes him the most compelling person whenever he shows up.)

On paper, Eleanor sounds like the perfect person to kick off this series. Sadly, she’s a total drip. The fault doesn’t seem to lie with Washington either. When she returns to a prominent role towards the series back half, she’s far better. It’s just that Imperfect Women decides to center her at her lowest, most confused time, and yet seems utterly unaware of how to make that compelling.

Things do improve from there. Nancy’s section is perhaps the most compelling, despite giving Mara nothing more than a pile of “girl from the wrong side of the tracks marries up” clichés. The real meat of the mystery arrives in Mary’s (Elisabeth Moss) section, but that suffers from a bit of too little too late. Both those sections also rely on reframing the character to spark some surprises. However, since the show has barely given the audience a sketch of the character in the first place, the alterations to them come less as a surprise and more as an introduction. Clearly, Imperfect Women has an idea of how they want the audience to see this character. They just didn’t show, or even tell, the audience.

As the series progresses, even after it shakes off its dull, stumbling start, it can’t get momentum going because it keeps trying to serve two masters. On the one hand, it wants to be a bit trashy, full of steamy sex, melodramatic betrayals, and “oh my god, she’s a drug addict?!” shocking revelations. On the other, it keeps trying to walk like a prestige drama, pushing to be less a potboiler and more a meditation on the “can’t win coming or going” paradox of life as a middle-aged woman in America and on the friendships that tension produces.

Perhaps another show could realize both goals well. Imperfect Women, on the other hand, ricochets between them, largely unable to hold both in hand at the same time. The show criticizes itself, essentially, in an episode where Mary receives criticism of her novel from her writers’ group. The suggestions are similarly demanding of an everything-all-at-once kind of final result. Be a story of a student who became the other woman who became a mom only to wake up one day and no longer recognize herself. But also?! Be a murder mystery about a much richer mom with an even more tragic backstory. And please, lots of adultery. Every competent part has promise, but the show can’t stitch them together into a compelling or even cohesive whole.

Imperfect Women tries to have it all and solve a murder starting March 18 on AppleTV.

Imperfect Women Trailer: