Set in Nantucket, “The Perfect Couple” portrays a rarefied, 1% version of America in which people have staff and use “summer” as a verb. Which is precisely why director Susanne Bier turned down the offer to direct Netflix’s adapt tion of Elin Hilderbrand’s novel when producer Gail Berman first approached her.

“It’s not my world,” says Bier, the Danish director whose films “After the Wedding” and “In a Better World” were nominated for Oscars, and who won a directing Emmy for the 2016 Tom Hiddleston spy thriller “The Night Manager.”

Berman and screenwriter Jenna Lamia persuaded Bier to change her mind. With the show set to start shooting in a few months and no cast attached, the director wasted no time reaching out to Nicole Kidman. They’d worked together on the HBO limited series “The Undoing,” and now she offered her the role of moneyed matriarch Greer Garrison Winbury.