His And Hers Review | Sex, Lies And An Overstuffed (Non)Thriller

His and Hers, a six-part limited series, based on the popular novel of the same name by Alice Feeney, is packaged as a murder mystery, but it is more about twisty vibes and melodrama than anything resembling a coherent narrative. To make matters worse, a female voiceover intones that there are two sides to every story. “Which means someone is always lying,” it says, making you believe and hope that you are in the presence of a glossy, efficient adaptation of a bestselling thriller. Sure, a naked body shows up in the first 15 minutes (lying on a bonnet, no less), following which several dead bodies show up, making it feel like it’s going to get thrilling, but it doesn’t.

For the most part, that’s okay, because sometimes you want to give your brains a break when you Netflix and chill. But this series takes our parked brains for granted and that’s where the trouble lies. Right from the start, His and Hers is teeming with plot holes, misdirection and seemingly unreliable narrators.

Jon Bernthal (Walking Dead) and Tessa Thompson (Creed) star as Jack and Anna, an estranged couple whose marriage collapsed following the death of their young daughter. After disappearing for a year, Anna, a well-known news anchor in Atlanta, decides to return to their nondescript hometown of Dahlonega, Georgia to cover the murder of a local woman who was stabbed to death. This puts her directly in Jack’s path, since he’s the detective who’s investigating the case.

Jack Harper is an excessively posturing, yell-y detective who should be banned from any crime scene, because he is less show, more tell and that cannot be a good thing for crime-solving, an efficient assistant notwithstanding. A performative single parent, he knows his toddler’s schedule and food preferences by heart, just as that of his dementia-ridden mother-in-law, to whom he is a more present caregiver than his estranged wife.

Although leads Thompson and Bernthal seem to know their way around smouldering sexual tension, nothing about their relationship dynamics keeps us interested in them. The pair is at their best when they’re tackling the long-tail impact of grief. Their fallout from the death of their daughter doesn’t really get the focus it deserves, given that it’s the reason their marriage ended in the first place.

And because this is set in small-town Georgia, the murder victim is not only one of Anna’s former high school friends (an arch nemesis, actually), but the partner that Jack had been recently (read on the night of her death) having sex with.

The circumstances almost immediately make both parties suspects and although the show occasionally plays in to the idea that one of them might be guilty of the crime, it never really commits to it in any significant way

At some point, it gets frustrating to keep track of everyone’s lies, half-truths, and motivations; there’s so much happening at any given moment that it essentially flattens out the impact of any single revelation or twist. Dead bodies regurgitate friendship bracelets of yore; the estranged husband eavesdrops on his news anchor wife having loud moan-y sex with her chosen cameraman, while undermining his masculinity. It is no coincidence that said cameraman happens to be the husband of the blonde who replaced her as news anchor.

It tries to do too much, given its pace and the six-episode frame. But, like so much else in this show, these subplots are never fleshed out enough to really feel purposeful. They just become another narrative tick-box that must be checked off. As the absurdity multiples, you get angrier for parking your brains and then even angrier when serious issues like sexual assault, bullying and dementia are planted randomly in deeply problematic ways.

His and Hers is actually a hot mess, full of plot holes, contrivances and not one, but two cliched endings that pretend to be more shocking than they are. A geography lesson in Dahlonega (a city in Georgia where the story is set) shouldn’t compromise one’s brains so much. Not to mention that the entire storytelling gimmick of “his and hers”—two sides of the same story—is rendered virtually useless; most of the time it feels as though Jack and Anna aren’t even in the same story, let alone two halves of a whole.