‘His & Hers’ Review: Tessa Thompson and Jon Bernthal Can’t Save a Sad, Silly Netflix Mystery

In William Oldroyd's TV adaptation of Alice Feeney's 2020 novel, a separated couple is drawn back together by a woman's murder that involves them both.

Like too many simple-minded modern whodunits, the Netflix limited series “His & Hers” gets off on being withholding. Granted, some secrets have to be kept from an audience in order to deliver a climactic, satisfying reveal, but the ways in which creator William Oldroyd goes about obfuscating the truth in his broken marriage murder-mystery are clunky enough to prove irritating — and fast. It’s as if Anna (Tessa Thompson) and Jack (Jon Bernthal), the central couple, are tossed into their Southern potboiler at the same time we are, and their flailing attempts to figure out what’s going on inevitably feel silly when they’re meant to be foreboding, steamy, or fierce.

Take, for instance, one of the show’s oft-repeated lines (both diegetically and via Netflix‘s marketing materials): “There are at least two sides to every story,” Anna says via voiceover. “Yours and mine, ours and theirs, his and hers… which means someone is always lying.”

Except… that’s not what that means. Saying “there are two sides to every story” is just an acknowledgement that any given situation can be interpreted differently by different people. It’s about perspective, not truth. Just because I’ll go to my grave arguing every single Taylor Sheridan TV show is bad, that doesn’t mean my colleagues who enjoy them are liars. We saw the same story, we even agree on what happened, we just don’t agree whether all that macho posturing and sexist belittlement makes for good television.

The point being: A more attentive mystery may acknowledge its narrator’s misunderstanding as a key character flaw or missing piece to the larger puzzle. But “His & Hers” is not an attentive mystery. It’s a cheap one, happy to introduce an unreliable narrator by making her talk out of her ass. And Anna is an unreliable narrator. In the opening scene, she hurries home in the middle of the night, guzzles wine from the fridge, and rushes to get rid of… something. Then, the next morning, a dead body turns up on the roof of a little red Corvette.

Coincidence? Of course not. Neither is the fact that her estranged husband, a detective for the sheriff’s department, leads the murder investigation. Neither is Anna’s decision to emerge from self-imposed exile to report on the investigation, hurrying first to the office to convince her boss it’s worth covering and then to the crime scene in time to ask Jack, in front of his colleagues and hers, “Detective Harper, is it true you knew [the victim]?”

A big-shot reporter. A small town cop. A dead body — and a fractured marriage — between them. If Jack deployed his thick good-ol-boy drawl as voice-over at any point, we’d have two unreliable narrators. Since he doesn’t (further proof the show isn’t interested in varied perspectives), is simply unbelievable. Their exaggerated accents and melodramatic accusations prop up half-formed characters, offering silly, fleeting fun by way of apologizing for waiting so long to ask the right questions.

But Anna and Jack don’t carry enough weight to fulfill the hot-and-heavy ambitions of their torrid, tragic crime story. Bernthal, to be fair, is short-changed. Despite a committed turn, Jack’s perspective is even more constricted than Anna’s. Sometimes his one-note rendering is intentional, like when he’s scrambling to hide a suspicious piece of evidence or suggesting alternate theories that steer attention away from his family.

That’s what “His & Hers” wants to do: Send you bouncing back and forth like a ping-pong ball, believing Jack is the killer one minute and Anna is the killer the next. But it doesn’t commit. Far more convincing than what we see Jack do is what we don’t see Jack do: like when he first arrives at the crime scene, and the show cuts to Anna’s storyline before we can see Jack react to the body. If he did know her (which, spoiler alert, he did), wouldn’t that reaction be telling? If he killed her, he’d know what he was walking into. If he didn’t, he’d have to scramble to cover up his sudden shock. Either way, it’s a critical moment the show constructs and then casts aside, presumably because it’s too revealing.

Thompson, meanwhile, savors every contemptuous glare and hateful retort Anna regularly supplies. Her heightened haughtiness is good for a few laughs, but it’s just as easy to chuckle at what’s said rather than with the actor who’s saying it. Or, it would be easy to chuckle if Anna’s backstory wasn’t so horrific. Without getting into spoilers, her past is too much and too little at once: too much in the sense that what happened to her is far too upsetting to exist in a show with such a ridiculous ending, and too little in the sense that it’s only explored to the extent of justifying her venomous attitude.

If “His & Hers” was better at balancing its tawdry ingredients, perhaps they could’ve added up to some memorable histrionics. If it was more meticulous in laying out its mystery, perhaps there would’ve been some fun to be had in playing detective alongside our dueling dual investigators. (Thompson and Bernthal are good together!) Instead, the general indifference shown toward its own story — or, at least, the best versions of it — comes to emphasize the emptiness at its core. And the big reveal, so preciously protected until the very end, isn’t clever enough to distract from such a muted build-up. It isn’t really clever at all.

Whodunnits aren’t solely about answering a single question. They can be more, and “His & Hers” should’ve been.

Grade: D+

“His & Hers” premieres Thursday, January 8 on Netflix. All six episodes will be released at once.