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Jon Bernthal and Tessa Thompson in His & Hers.Netflix
His & Hers could have been a sexy and perfectly ludicrous TV thriller.
But then Netflix had to drag it all down again with another dead-child backstory.
This limited series starring Tessa Thompson and Jon Bernthal – hard to think of a hotter small-screen hookup outside Heated Rivalry – begins when a woman is murdered in a small town in Georgia, her body found full of stab wounds on the roof of her jeep.
The always electric Thompson plays Anna, an Atlanta TV journalist who rushes to the crime scene.
Bernthal, the ultimate hangdog bro, plays Jack, the rural detective trying to solve the case.
The first twist comes early: Anna and Jack are estranged husband and wife – and both were at the scene of the murder the night it took place.
The two are suspects to each other, and to those watching the series.
Neither are ethical in any way.
The journalist chugs rosé, sleeps with her married cameraman and breaks into crime scenes.
The detective makes one bad decision after another and eats an indecent number of bananas while having flashbacks to his trysts with the murder victim.
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Bernthal in His & Hers.Netflix
It’s all fun and games until along comes Netflix’s favourite thriller trope of the moment.
Anna and Jack’s baby died one night while being watched by Anna’s mother, you see. The series has to treat this seriously even though it is otherwise utterly unserious. Everything grinds to a halt.
His & Hers spins its wheels for at least two of its six episodes as the actors stop to act.
What a bummer! Why can’t we just have a good time watching imprudent protagonists investigate horrifically grisly murders any more on Netflix without having to think about, in this case, SIDS?
In The Beast in Me, Claire Danes spent a good chunk of her screen time brilliantly twisting her face into spasms of grief over her child killed by a drunk driver – an attempt to bring gravity to an otherwise absurd cat-and-mouse game between her memoirist and a rich serial killer.
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Thompson in His & Hers.Netflix
In Untamed, Eric Bana was the most miserable park ranger of all time owing to the death of a child many years earlier. The real crime of that thriller: All those scenes of Bana’s character talking to a hallucination of his young son.
The dead kid in His & Hers originates in the source material, an Alice Feeney novel set in Britain.
The setting has been moved to Georgia by showrunner Dee Johnson, no doubt to capitalize on the state’s film and television tax credits.
Clearly, what we really need is some sort of financial incentive to stop Netflix creators from using dead children as a lazy substitute for character development.
Losing a child is the ultimate tragedy. It’s not shorthand for darkness. It’s not foreplay, as it is in one episode of His & Hers.
Grief, in general, is tedious. It’s motionless. It’s static. It’s hard to depict truthfully in any TV show, let alone a thriller.
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Rhoda Griffis in His & Hers.Netflix
The way Brad Ingelsby incorporated the grief of Mark Ruffalo’s character into the plot of Task is an example of how to give it its proper weight. And the death his FBI agent was grappling with was a complicated, singular situation. It wasn’t a copy-paste dead kid.
While a broodier mystery show might have made it work, His & Hers is incapable of pulling off pretty much anything that is realistically dramatic.
The less said about the part of the plot in which we revisit Anna’s teenage years and the mean girls she hung out with at her private school, the better. Adolescence has rarely been so psychotically depicted, its traumas reduced to over-the-top urban legend.
The final episode and a half of His & Hers bring back the full-on loopiness of the first. Everything goes off the rails. There’s a last-minute curveball explained by a letter and a montage.
Campy stuff. But then we cut to Anna and Jack and a child – and it’s a reminder of the other dead fictional one, the latest sacrificed unnecessarily to give the illusion of depth to a puddle of pulp.
