As splashy thrillers of every style and subgenre proliferate on platforms clamoring for viewers’ rapt attention, what increasingly separates the ones worth getting hooked on from the ones that are just wasting our time is a single quality: tone. They all feature a marquee star or two. Many, from Alfonso Cuarón’s Disclaimer to the ever-expanding David E. Kelley canon, also boast a prestigious or at least famous creator. Most are adapted from bestselling suspense novels. And they invariably move at a whiplash pace, leaving big blanks to fill in and a cliffhanger at the end of each episode. But none of these enticements can conceal the absence of scripts and direction that set a distinctive mood, then deftly navigate every deliberate shift. With belt-cinching streamers straining to do more with less, sloppy vibe calibration has become a common problem.
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Such is, unfortunately, the case with His & Hers, a Netflix crime thriller that promisingly casts Tessa Thompson and Jon Bernthal as estranged spouses who suspect each other of murdering a woman they both knew. Created by William Oldroyd, a filmmaker who made his name with the acclaimed big-screen psychological thrillers Lady Macbeth and Eileen, it comes with a cinematic pedigree. It relocates a popular novel by British author Alice Feeney from the UK to Hollywood’s cost-effective new production mecca, Georgia. There’s an echo of Mr. & Mrs. Smith (the Brad Pitt-Angelina Jolie spy movie more than Donald Glover’s series-length riff on it) in both His & Hers’ title and its premise; sex, violence, ambition, and mutual mistrust propel the six-episode arc. The trouble is that Oldroyd never quite decides how seriously to take the story he’s telling. Arch at some moments and grim at others, the show ultimately works as neither a self-aware black comedy nor a poignant exploration of the not-at-all-funny traumas it uncovers.
The first episode is all fake-outs and reveals too gratuitous to refrain from spoiling here (but consider this your warning). Thompson’s Anna Andrews initially appears as a frantic figure in a ratty hoodie, chugging wine from the bottle and rustling around an Atlanta apartment that is in an alarming state of disarray. But she quickly cleans up, saunters into the offices of a local TV news station, and finds that the anchor job from which she has taken a long leave of absence has been permanently handed to a smirking blonde named Lexy Jones (Rebecca Rittenhouse). An hour and change outside the city, in the picturesque town of Dahlonega, Bernthal’s Jack Harper is a police detective alerted by his young partner (Sunita Mani) that a body has been found in the forest. We know we’re supposed to like Jack because the first time we see him, he’s playing with an adorable tot (Ellie Rose Sawyer) whose mom, Zoe (Marin Ireland), is too hungover to parent. It is Anna’s insistence that her old boss let her report on the murder Jack is investigating that brings the leads together.
Not that they’re exactly strangers. His & Hers takes its time, for no good reason, clarifying the relationships between the central characters—not just Anna and Jack, who apparently spent months searching for her after she suddenly left him, but also Jack and Zoe (they’re brother and sister). It treats the death of the couple’s baby before her flight as a major revelation, even though losing a child is the catalyst for just about every marital rift you ever see in this kind of show. Each of these bombshells does more to create plot holes and necessitate scenes that make zero sense in retrospect than it does to heighten suspense. More effective is Oldroyd’s patience in establishing Jack and Anna’s histories with the murder victim, Rachel Hopkins (Jamie Tisdale).
The show often operates in a playfully soapy, can-you-believe-we-just-did-that register. An opening shot of the beautiful Rachel, twitching in a blood-soaked white dress on the hood of a red car, illuminated by its headlights, sets that tone. An even pulpier tableau calls back to that scene in the final moments of the premiere. Anna’s rivalry with Lexy is as gleefully bitchy as anything on The Morning Show; she demands to have Lexy’s boorish cameraman husband, Richard (Pablo Schreiber in punchable Orange Is the New Black mode), sent on assignment with her and wastes no time getting him into bed. Sex is a power game and, when a minor character’s mild kinks are exposed, a naughty punchline. Yet these touches are never extreme or imaginative or entertaining enough to match, say, the wild ride that was The Hunting Wives. I didn’t find myself gasping with delight at any of the twists, the way I did while watching Sirens.
Any joy you manage to extract from Thompson’s performance, which calls back to her intense turn as a tragic Ibsen heroine in last year’s Hedda but also has some playful, in-on-the-joke bounce to it, will likely be stolen by the story’s incongruously somber elements. Afflicted with dementia, Anna’s mother, Alice (Crystal Fox), has languished in her daughter’s absence. Ninety-ninety times out of 100, using sexual assault as character development cheapens a horrific experience, and Oldroyd’s deployment of this trope is among the cheapest I’ve seen in post-#MeToo TV. Both of the above are essential to the show’s endgame, ensuring that a sequence of unhinged kickers ostensibly meant to be devilish fun instead come across as mean-spirited and exploitative.
For every great thriller like BEEF that nails a tricky mix of humor and pathos, there are many—All Her Fault, Murdaugh, most Ryan Murphy series, and the final season of You, to name just a few from the past year—that don’t even appear to be trying to reconcile their disparate tones. On one level, these shows are casualties of an industry whose dire financial situation has led to the cutting of creative corners. His & Hers can be particularly lazy with its dialogue. “The killer could be with us in this very room” is uttered without irony. A reporter declares into the camera: “You heard it here first.” A little bit of quality control, a little extra care when it came to editing scripts and crafting characters and establishing an evocative atmosphere, would have gone a long way.
Ultimately, though, the failures of the watchable but empty His & Hers and its disappointing ilk are failures of empathy. When BEEF or, more recently, Wayward is funny, it’s because viewers are laughing with their most relatable characters, not making light of their pain. The joke isn’t on the protagonists for feeling justifiable feelings. It isn’t on us for caring what happens to them, either.
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