Bonnie Carlson

Bonnie is the new wife of Madeline's ex-husband, a yoga instructor whose calm, barefoot serenity seems to needle everyone around her. She wants to be liked, to fold herself into this Monterey world of school runs and playdates, and mostly succeeds despite Madeline's simmering resentment. She's warm, watchful, a little inscrutable.

Kravitz plays Bonnie's placidity as something with weight underneath it, so the character never curdles into a smug-younger-wife cliché. The show keeps her slightly apart from the other mothers' chatter, and that distance becomes its own kind of tension—you sense there's more going on behind the eyes than the beach-town serenity lets on.