Summary
His & Hers breaks a lot of thriller rules, and it’s about exclusively unpleasant characters, but both of these things ultimately benefit it across six tight, twisty episodes.
There’s an old myth that an audience has to “like” the main characters of a story to connect with it and be engaged by it. I’ve always thought this was a fairly childish way of thinking, and His & Hers is a very strong argument that I’m right. The six-part Netflix murder-mystery, adapted from the Alice Feeney novel of the same name, is about truly deplorable, awful people, and it’s engaging all the way through. Fancy that.
It’s also unusual in that the two prime suspects in the case are the two lead characters, one of whom is actively investigating it. That’s a pretty significant deviation from the usual thriller formula, and helps to justify how unlikeable everyone is. There’s a method. You don’t like anyone because you don’t trust anyone, and you don’t trust anyone because you’re not supposed to. You need to believe that everyone is capable of murder, for any number of reasons, to make the whole thing tick.
And boy, when it gets going, it ticks. So, treat this as something of a public service announcement. Stick with His & Hers. Don’t be put off. It’s going somewhere. It even has several proper twists; not performative ass-pull ones, but proper, kick-yourself, the-clues-were-there-all-along twists. It’d be a shame to miss out because you think the leads are insufferable. Remember, you’re supposed to.
But here’s the general idea. There has, as usual, been a murder. In this one, a woman has been violently stabbed to death in the small town of Dahlonega, Georgia. The detective investigating the case is Jack Harper (Jon Bernthal; The Bear, American Gigolo, Daredevil: Born Again), a local with a personal connection to the victim. The journalist reporting from the field is Anna Anderson (Tessa Thompson; Creed 3, Thor: Love and Thunder, Marvel’s What If…?), who is from Dahlonega but relocated to Atlanta to pursue her career as a beloved TV news anchor. Jack and Anna are technically married, but estranged after a personal trauma caused Anna to disappear for a year. Now, Anna’s back in town to reboot her floundering professional life on the back of a tragedy that, it quickly transpires, both she and Jack are intimately connected to in various different ways.
No more of that, since I don’t want to give anything important away. Needless to say, it’s obvious from the very first minute that both Jack and Anna are psychos. Bernthal plays the former like he drinks espresso through an IV, and Tessa Thompson’s devilish smirk and foreboding narration – a played-out crutch that is reworked into a neat plot device late on – hide ill intentions. Almost immediately, it’s obvious that Anna is trying to torment the woman who took her job, Lexy Jones (Rebecca Rittenhouse, Maggie), by taking her cameraman husband Richard (Pablo Schreiber; Candy, Halo, The Terminal List: Dark Wolf) to Dahlonega with her, and that Jack’s look-at-me-charisma is obscuring darker underpinnings. But are either of them murderers?
His & Hers is nifty at creating small-town texture by introducing a bunch of supporting characters who all know each other on a pretty intimate level. Jack lives with his sister, Zoe (Marin Ireland, Justified: City Primeval), who went to the same elite all-girls school as Anna and the victim, which is now presided over by another of their former friends. Jack also maintains a relationship with his mother-in-law, Alice (Crystal Fox; A Fall From Grace, The Big Door Prize), who is beginning to show signs of dementia and keeps being picked up by the police wandering naked through town. You really do get the sense that everyone knows each other, and more importantly, that everyone knows something that they’re not saying.
This sort of paranoid vibe is like rocket fuel for a six-episode series. Each episode runs around 45 minutes and screams by as if it has somewhere else to be, and it’s difficult not to be engaged since there’s so much happening at once you can barely keep track of it. There are moments of sustained tension – most of them revolving around the idea of someone being caught doing something they shouldn’t be, rather than anyone being murdered – but the driving force of the narrative is mystery, each answer to a thousand different concurrent questions forming another piece of a much larger puzzle.
His & Hers isn’t an actor’s showcase, though. Bernthal and Thompson are both very good in it – bolstered by solid supporting turns, including one from Sunita Mani (Spirited, Bupkis) as Jack’s partner, Priya, which is important since she’s very much the question-asking audience surrogate character – but they’re both playing in such exaggerated modes that there isn’t a great deal of room for depth and nuance. There’s some sexual chemistry, and at least one scene is earnest enough for Bernthal to channel some of that “Punisher in the cemetery” energy, but nobody really has time to do anything other than frantically pursue the next lead.
It’s good, though, which feels like a bit of a slap in the face to something like Harlan Coben’s Run Away, which is very much the imitative version of a proper twisty thriller like this. Mileage may vary, since there’s a good chance that plenty simply won’t be able to get past how genuinely off-putting all of the characters are, but that bleak, hopeless tone fits the story really well. There’s something to be said for shows about horrible people doing awful things. At least they’re pretty realistic.
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