Key Highlights
- The Netflix limited series “His & Hers” is a disappointment despite promising elements.
- Writer-director William Oldroyd fails to build momentum and ends with an inept finale.
- Main stars Tessa Thompson and Jon Bernthal lack chemistry, making the plot contrived.
- The series is plagued by predictable plot mechanics and poorly developed characters.
Review of Netflix’s “His & Hers”: A Disappointing Mystery Series
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 Series: A Generic Disappointment
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. It’s up to 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.
The Plot: Predictable Contrivances
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.
Characters and Finale: A Letdown
Anna (Thompson), a former Atlanta news anchor who dropped off the map following the death of her child, returns unexpectedly after a year’s absence. 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.
Direction and Narration: A Hollow Experience
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 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.
Final Verdict
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. The direction by Oldroyd and Anja Marquardt creates an artificiality that mirrors the narrative’s hollow aesthetic. Scenes are lit in ways unsupported by the location, creating a pretty, glossy and hollow look to the series, like it’s constantly aware that it’s a television murder mystery.