The Perfect Couple is currently the most-watched show on Netflix and fans love its crazy script, including a character who proudly declares that she once dated the Duke of York.

A throwaway line in a new Netflix drama has left TV critics baffled on both sides of the Pond. While being interviewed by police, a character bizarrely declares: “I dated Prince Andrew.”

The Perfect Couple is a murder mystery set in Nantucket and starring Nicole Kidman as a rich and famous author and Liev Schrieber as her husband. There are twists and turns galore involving a family wedding and multiple dead bodies.

French actress Isabelle Adjani plays Isabel, an old friend of Kidman’s character, Greer-Garrison Winbury. Called in for questioning by the police in the second episode, she mumbles: “I dated Prince Andrew, which was… d’accord… er, before!”

It is not clear if this is a reference to “before” his involvement in the Jeffrey Epstein/Ghislaine Maxwell scandal. However, the script also has another nod to Epstein. The Winburys are described as old money and being “child-sex-ring-on-a-private-island rich … kill-someone-and-get-away-with-it rich”.

The Perfect Couple, which also stars Dakota Fanning, Eve Hewson, Ishaan Khattar and Jack Reynor, is currently the most-watched show on the streaming platform. The opening credits are a hit too, thanks to the full cast performing a choreographed dance routine outside the Winbury family residence, set to Meghan Trainor’s song Criminals.

However, not everyone is convinced. In a review for the Sunday Times, columnist Camilla Long says: “The script isn’t funny, though – it’s weird. As for the the rest of it, it’s simply awful – ugly, slow, boring. How can you get this so wrong?”

She adds: “Occasionally you’ll be lulled back into thinking it’s a lovely, perfectly normal prestige thriller, but then Adjani will pop up, as one of Greer’s friends, hardly able to utter her lines, telling us, ‘I dated Prince Andrew’.”

Isabelle Adjani in The Perfect Couple (Image: Netflix)
For US culture magazine, Vulture, Roxana Hadidi says The Perfect Couple is “wonderfully, preposterously hilarious. It is the most I’ve laughed while watching a TV series all year”.

She too picked up on the Andrew line, writing: “Isabel casually shares that she once dated Prince Andrew … and then, when in bed with Abby’s husband, Tom (Jack Reynor), compares his sexual style with that of his father, Tag, because she’s slept with him, too.”

Adjani, 69, is one of the most famous actresses in France. She has dated Warren Beatty, Daniel Day-Lewis and Jean-Michel Jarre. Andrew, 64, dated the American photographer and actress Koo Stark before he married Sarah Ferguson.