‘The Perfect Couple’ & The Long, Complicated History of Sex Work’s Depiction In Media
Image; Netflix
‘Rich people doing murders’ is a favorite topic of television. Whether talking about Revenge (2011–2015) or Big Little Lies (2017–2025), there is something intriguing about watching the wealthy grapple with murder (particularly their own), the one problem they cannot yet buy their way out of.
The Perfect Couple (2024) is a limited series that revels in the opulence of the Nantucket-summering Winbury family as they move about the world in bright pastels and refined perfection. The show’s theme song, Criminals by Meghan Trainor and J.bird, plays at the start of every episode, with the Winbury wedding party performing a perfectly choreographed flash dance to it.
Throughout the series, we are meant to question the ‘perfect’ facade this family puts on and take a visceral pleasure as it crumbles.
It was a surprise when sex work became such a central element of the show, especially when it was not an object of mockery but of strength for one of the main characters. It’s this (mostly) positive portrayal that I want to talk about today as we contextualize it into a bitter and evolving history of sex work on the Silver Screen.
A brief recap of sex work’s portrayal in film and TV
Sex work (i.e., one’s sale of sexual, intimate, and often emotional labor for direct material compensation) has a contentious place in US society. It remains primarily illegal, and “wh*re” or “pr*stitute” are derogatory labels spoken all over this country as insults.
For the longest time, we saw this disdain reflected in how sex work was portrayed in media. The Hays Code (1934–1968) and The Code of Practices for Television Broadcasters (1952 to 1983) prohibited the positive portrayal of sex work, as well as any sexual and romantic relationships that deviated from the mononormative, heterosexist norm.
An excellent example of this fact is the Great American Classic Baby Face (1933), which was actually released the year before the Hays Code’s proper implementation in 1934. The film stars Golden Age actress Barbara Stanwyck as Lily Powers, the daughter of a speakeasy owner who engages in sex work during the Prohibition. Following her father’s death, she is encouraged by a mentor to “use” the men around her. She moves to the Big City and sleeps her way to the top of a bank called Gotham Trust Building. The original ending has Lily Powers more or less get away with this behavior. Her current partner, bank president Courtland Trenholm (George Brent), attempts suicide after she refuses to return money to him, and there is no narrative comeuppance.
Yet as the film started to get censored all over the country — alongside more general calls for the government to intervene in Hollywood’s “degeneracy” — its producer, Warner Bros., hastily reshot it so that Lily loses everything alongside her husband. There is a scene, tacked on at the end, where the bank’s board members discuss how Lily and her man have paid their debt to the bank and are now penniless.
This requirement that “degenerate” behavior (like sex work was believed to be at the time) never be validated in the narrative persisted for decades (see also Waterloo Bridge (1940), Streets of Shame (1956), Irma La Douce (1963), etc.).
Even after the Hays Code was done away with, the demonization of sex work remained a constant in film and television.
In particular, the “Disposable Sex Worker” trope — where a sex worker is killed to highlight the depravity of a specific character, environment, or event — has been the go-to for a lot of action and horror movies for over the last half a century. Whether we are talking about Patrick Bateman (Christian Bale) murdering sex workers in American Psycho (2000) or Catherine (Julianne Moore) pushing the eponymous Chloe (Amanda Seyfried) out a window in the 2009 film of the same name, this trope has been criticized for framing sex workers as disposable.
This trope’s sister is the “Heart of Gold” trope, where sex workers such as Vivian (Julia Roberts) in Pretty Woman (1990) and Alina (Chloë Grace Moretz) in The Equalizer (2014) are just so nice and kind that they give money away for free and provide emotional labor for seemingly random strangers.
Both of these tropes have long been criticized as dehumanizing because they strip the character in question of three-dimensionality. The sex worker is either unneeded, as with the Disposable Sex Worker Trope, or living in the service of another. As the artist and former sex worker Andrea Werhun told the CBC about sex work’s typical depiction in media:
“We’re victims, were villains, we’re dead, we’ve got hearts of gold. These are such shallow depictions that flatten our humanity and remove nuance and complexity from who we are as human beings, as people.”
I am not going to pretend that these tropes have gone away. I was recently watching the premiere of the second season of Schmigadoon (2021–2023), and the inciting incident revolves around a burlesque dancer’s murder. It takes a long time for problematic norms to die, and we are in the middle of that process for some of these tropes, not the end.
Yet more positive ones have certainly come to the forefront in recent years as society’s empathy with sex work has started to widen, in no small part due to the work of activists who have pushed for its acceptance. The film Anora (2024) has been praised for its humanizing portrayal as acts of everyday mundaneity are shown alongside the sex work. The escort Margot Mills (Anya Taylor-Joy) in The Menu (2022) is the only person who walks away from that horror film alive after using her working-class roots to convince antagonist Julian Slowik (Ralph Fiennes) to let her go.
It is this thread that The Perfect Couple falls into, providing us a glimpse into a sex worker who is neither disposable nor warm-and-cuddly.
The Perfect Couple
We learn that Winbury matriarch Greer (Nicole Kidman) was a sex worker during a reveal in the final episode of the season. She has had enough of the secrets and confesses:
“Your father and I didn’t meet in a gallery opening. We met in a bar…I was an escort…I had sex with men for money. My brother organized the clientele, and your father was one of those men.”
When juxtaposing the “disposable” and “heart of gold” sex worker tropes, a hierarchy often arises in these media depictions between people “working the streets” and “high-end” escorts who are believed to have closer contact with the rich and powerful and consequently in some ways redeemable. The latter women are the ones more likely to be “saved” from the profession, or so the logic of these tropes usually goes.
Yet something interesting has happened in The Perfect Couple — Greer was “saved.” She married a rich man, Tag Winbury (Liev Schreiber), and leveraged that to become a successful author, but it didn’t change her dynamic in the relationship. Tag still treats her as if she were someone working for him. His family lost a lot of their wealth in what one character facetiously calls a “classic American tragedy.” Yet Tag spends his spare time taking drugs and having affairs with other women, while Greer is the one we are told rather explicitly is paying for everything.
She’s still working for the same client.
Furthermore, Tag is seemingly in control of the finances. When his son, Thomas Winbury (Jack Reynor), needs money to stave off a terrible cryptocurrency investment, he goes to Tag for a loan despite his father having no actual competency in making money. This makes the financial advice he gives Thomas when he refuses the loan — i.e., that Thomas should “know” if his investments will perform— so chilling because you can argue he’s referring to Greer. She’s the investment he knew would perform.
This control he has is confusing before the reveal, and it’s only afterward that we learn that Tag has been subtly threatening Greer throughout the entire series. The insults he throws at her, such as “colorful” and a “workhorse,” are microaggressions reminding her of her past to put so he can her in “her place.”
It’s only after she comes forward about her past that Greer can sever ties with a man who, in retrospect, was emotionally abusive, and even as it’s happening, he still can’t believe it. “It never occurred to me,” he laments as he hands over the divorce papers, “not even once, that you might actually leave me.”
Greer receives her “happy ending,” not because a man saved her but because she separated from that man.
A satisfying conclusion
We can look at The Perfect Couple as a refutation of the trope of “a sex worker being saved by a client.” While she may have financially benefited from the background the Winbury name gave her, it was far from a happily ever after. He trapped her in an emotionally abusive relationship that took her a lifetime to untangle herself from.
I have some minor nitpicks about this series. From a certain lens, framing Greer’s reveal as a sex worker as shedding her “perfect persona” can be viewed by some as condescending. I understand that it was a source of shame for her because of the abuse she experienced — abuse necessary to subvert the happily ever after trope — but some may still be unsettled by this framing, and I am not here to dissipate that tension.
Yet overall, the show feels like an okay indicator of the state of representation surrounding sex work. Over the past few years, there have been materially negative developments in the US over the legalization of sex work, so it’s nice to see that, at least onscreen, our societal outlook on it continues to shift for the better.