His & Hers Review – This thriller is the perfect TV show for the New Year | television

A A woman lies bloodied and finally trembling on the hood of a car parked deep in the woods. Another woman arrives home covered in blood, gasping in fear, drinking wine, and begins wringing her hands before clearing her apartment of everything.

A female voiceover indicates that there are two sides to every story. “Which means someone is always lying.” It’s obviously utter nonsense, but it looks great, and more importantly, it confirms what we were hoping for: that we’re in for a glossy, effective version of a best-selling thriller, and it’s time to turn off our brains and enjoy it (unless you’re the type who likes to try to solve a puzzle before the characters do, in which case, good luck and tell me where you get the energy).

This brilliantly competent special is His & Hers, a six-part adaptation of Alice Feeney’s 2020 bestseller of the same name (there are two more in the works – Sometimes I Lie and Rock Paper Scissors), produced by Jessica Chastain and featuring a fine cast in the lead parts.

Jon Bernthal (The Bear, We Own This City, and, for those whose memories go back that far, the early and much-maligned loss of The Walking Dead) plays small-town detective Jack Harper, in charge of the murder investigation. Tessa Thompson (Westworld, Creed) is Anna, a tough-as-nails former TV news anchor who gets an early wind of the case in her old hometown, and is keen to get the scoop to regain her position at the station. Her stand was taken on by a younger, blond rival while she was mourning the loss of her child. But we are not in the business of exploring unfathomable grief here, but simply providing motivation and narrative thrust. So, we don’t dwell on the grief, rather we enjoy taking Anna’s rival husband, Richard (Pablo Schreiber), with her as her photographer and, once she’s undermined his marriage and indirectly challenged his masculinity (invisible next to your famous wife who earns five times your salary, right?), her after-hours entertainment. Anna is also the woman we saw back panting and covered in purple at the top of the show.

The next revelation is that Jack and Anna are estranged husband and wife. Although he wasn’t kinky enough to accept the fact that she was fucking the photographer. The dead woman – I might as well tell you all while I get you – is Rachel Hopkins (Jamie Tisdale, Isabelle Cossman as a teen), who was by all accounts, Anna included, the worst of the girls growing up (we get a flashback scene of Anna, who was in her clique at school, watching her trick someone into drinking a cup of piss) and didn’t improve greatly after that.

And the suspects pile up accordingly – including Anna. And shortly afterwards, Jack – who certainly didn’t want to give the required cheek swab to all the officers who dealt with the discovery of Rachel’s body, so as to keep them out of the investigation. There’s also Rachel’s cuckold husband, Clyde (Chris Bauer, a veteran character actor hired here, I suspect, for his ability to deliver a line like “She had a mercenary energy that I found intoxicating” without bringing down the entire wobbly edifice), as well as an unspecified number of cuckolds. And unless the girl who drank the piss walks away, I’ll put her on the list too.

Additional complications and potential plot lines include other girls from the gang, Jack’s alcoholic sister Zoe (Maren Ireland) and Anna’s elderly mother – who has neglected her, and who is still cared for by Jack – who is losing her grip on reality but whose porous memory still holds a vital clue or two about secrets she thought were long buried. The use of dementia as an acceptable form of deus ex machina in thrillers is something I would complain about, but I’m not sure to whom. I’ll have to wait and find out if His & Hers are actually guilty first, I guess.

Fluctuations, they are many. The absurdities multiply. Viewers’ enjoyment increases. The scenario – regardless of the intoxicating mercenaryism – is serviceable. This quest is binable. No one needs more, this early in the year. Comfortable TV for him and her is enough.