The enticing combination of well-regarded source material, an elusive auteur tackling television for the first time, and a pair of photogenic stars prone to interesting choices yields the first disappointment of the new year with Netflix‘s His & Hers.
Writer-director William Oldroyd, who found intriguing angles within the gothic romance (Lady Macbeth) and feminist prison noir (Eileen), is thoroughly thwarted by Alice Feeney’s book, fumbling the mystery’s structuring device and failing to build any momentum on the way to an inept finale with two endings — one stupid and obvious, the other merely stupid.
The resulting series is, at least until the actively irritating finale, more generic than overtly bad, calling to mind various forgettable Netflix limited series filmed in Southern tax havens and forgotten by all but television critics. Put a different way, if your series keeps reminding me of a less interesting version of, like, the 2022 Michelle Monaghan doppelgänger dud Echoes, the chances of your series having a memorable afterlife are limited.
It’s up to leads Tessa Thompson and Jon Bernthal to try, without much success, to bring depth to what is five episodes of predictable plot mechanics and the finale faceplant. Unfortunately, with almost no chemistry between them, they’re lost in a sea of unconvincing misdirections that should have been a 90-minute feature, if that.
The series begins with a murder in tiny Dahlonega, an indistinct town an hour from Atlanta. The crime is notable because the victim was stabbed many times and staged with a taunting message, and because nobody in Dahlonega has ever had to deal with a murder before, other than Jack Harper (Bernthal), a detective and native son who once worked in Atlanta. This gives Jack an excuse to bark really obvious orders at his partner Priya (Sunita Mani, who feels like she could be in a different show that I’d probably have preferred), whom he calls “Boston” for unclear reasons.
The case catches the attention of Anna (Thompson), a former Atlanta news anchor who dropped off the map following the death of her child. Anna returns unexpectedly after a year’s absence, during which she was replaced as the face of the network by Lexy (Rebecca Rittenhouse, bad, but not her fault). Anna sees the Dahlonega murder as her opportunity to recapture her position, in part because she grew up in Dahlonega, so she commandeers Richard (Pablo Schreiber, bad, but not his fault), a cameraman who just happens to be Lexy’s husband.
The plot of His & Hers is packed with “just happens to be” contrivances. The murder victim just happens to be Anna’s high-school frenemy, Jack just happens to have his own relationship with the victim, and Jack and Anna just happen to be married — though that’s more of a technicality than anything else, since she ghosted him for a year as well.
Because of all these “just happens to be” contrivances, it takes very little time before both Anna and Jack are suspects in the murder. Or at least that’s what’s suggested by the plot description for His & Hers, which I found confusing because there wasn’t a single second in the series that gave me reason to think either of them was a killer. Instead, I spent most of the time being distracted from any reasonable suspects by how bad Jack is as a detective and how bad Anna is as a reporter. The shared ineptitude, more than actual emotional friction, ended up being the reason I believed them as a couple. They deserve each other, and they both deserve better from the series.
Episodes are bound together by banal introductory voiceover, in which our narrator recites ominous clichés that, like everything in His & Hers, border on parody. The first episode, for example, begins with the philosophically specious declaration, “There are at least two sides to every story. Yours and mine. Ours and theirs. His and hers. Which means someone is always lying.” What about Yours, Mine & Ours? That’s a different movie.
The book is structured so that both Jack and Anna are given their perspectives, their sides — “his and hers,” as it were. The narration, though, comes from an unclear and ungendered perspective, meant to keep you guessing.
Somewhere along the line, Oldroyd or Netflix or the series’ more experienced TV writers, including Dee Johnson (Nashville) and Bill Dubuque (Ozark), lost either the ability or the desire to mimic the book’s structure. Yes, we follow Anna and Jack even when they’re separate. But instead of feeling like a story being told from autonomous perspectives, forcing us to examine and distrust their subjective responses to the crimes — the first victim is not the last, with each victim tied into a perfunctory “Man, teenagers can be mean!” backstory — it’s just standard TV omniscience.
The characters are lying, to themselves and to each other, but the role of the audience in believing or not believing their lies is totally irrelevant. I’m not sure we’re supposed to participate in the mystery at all. There are very few fully dimensional characters, which means very few interesting suspects — though I guess we’re supposed to distrust the first victim’s impotent husband (Chris Bauer’s Duffie) or the prep school headmistress (Poppy Liu’s Helen Wang), who was also frenemies with Anna.
There’s slightly more interest in solving the mystery of Anna and Jack’s relationship and personal tragedy — which I guess involves Anna’s mother (Crystal Fox’s Alice), one of those TV characters defined by convenient dementia, and Jack’s sister (Marin Ireland’s Zoe), one of those TV characters defined by convenient alcoholism. But there’s never a sense that we’re seeing two sides to the story.
The ambiguous narrator, rather than being unreliable, just talks in reductive platitudes like “We humans are capable of afflicting such misery, such cruelty, such pain. And yet the most dangerous thing we do is lie to others and to ourselves.” Yes. Secrets and lies. Secrets and lies. It wasn’t that I didn’t trust the narrator. I was just bored by the narrator. Then when the finale repeats, verbatim, and reframes all the pieces of episode-opening blather, it’s irritating how little my own perspective was changed over the previous five-episode journey. (Honestly, before the finale, my review would have been tepid, but not negative.)
There’s an artificiality to the narration that is somewhat mirrored in the direction by Oldroyd and Anja Marquardt. Scenes are lit in ways unsupported by the location, creating a pretty, glossy and hollow aesthetic to the series, like it’s constantly aware that it’s a television murder mystery. Oldroyd did something similar with the meta-noir trappings in Eileen and the muted, swampy realism in Lady Macbeth, pushing both styles to an extreme, but in both cases it was possible to see what the singular writing-directing voice was saying about the genre. Here, I’m willing to accept that Oldroyd is trying to remind viewers that His & Hers is a work of fiction, familiar in all of its contrivances, but if there’s a next level, I can’t find it.
What hurts most is that there’s no single performance here as challenging and complex as what Florence Pugh was doing in Lady Macbeth or what Thomasin McKenzie delivered in Eileen — performances that demand focus and interpretation, conjuring the inscrutable within the familiar. In His & Hers, the series and the acting are all too scrutable.
Since the book’s structure was already trashed, I wonder if it might have been better to just make Thompson the focus of the series. In a show full of people doing dumb stuff, Anna is doing dumb stuff for ambiguous reasons, though nearly every aspect of her character is rendered either perplexing or illogical in the finale. That Thompson and Bernthal do not, in any way, interact like characters who have a long and difficult past together is more a fault of writing than performance. That characters who grew up in the same town, and in some cases in the same house, can’t decide on a consistent Southern accent or lack thereof is more a fault of direction than performance. That the series has both Nick Sobotka and Frank Sobotka from season two of The Wire and doesn’t let them share a scene is everybody’s fault.
Regardless, I think my favorite performances in the series come from Bauer, having fun if nothing else with a bizarre character; Ireland, who is reliably able to hit searing notes of pain, even if the character has nothing else to offer; and Mani, whose Priya walks around perplexed by the way everything is playing out in a way I found wholly relatable. Maybe if the series had been His & Hers & Priya’s, it might have been salvageable.