Yes that title is real.

After a long hiatus, I have decided to return to this blog for the sole purpose of venting about this show as a form of self-therapy.

So, The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window (or TWitHAtSftGitW) might be the most bizarre piece of television on offer at the moment. Quite an achievement, considering Christiano Ronaldo’s girlfriend inexplicably has her own documentary series now. Yet even something like that can be explained away as being in the same vein as Keeping up with the Kardashians with only about a 10th of the plastic surgery, as it feeds off people’s fascination with celebrities and the ego and narcissism of said celebrities.

TWitHAtSftGitW, however, has a less obvious explanation for how it came into being. As the title suggests, it exists in the same realm as The Girl on the Train and The Woman in the Window, where seemingly ordinary suburban mum Anna (played by Kristen Bell) witnesses a murder in a house across the street from hers. The title might also suggest a number of things about Netflix’s title naming department, but considering they named a murder mystery film Murder Mystery, it’s nothing we didn’t already know.

What sets TWitHAtSftGitW apart from these stories is nonsense. A lot of nonsense. My watching of the entire 8-episode miniseries in one sitting is not an indication of its quality, but instead a desire to get to the punchline of this joke. Except there wasn’t one. Everything from the clichéd characters, the unsubtle dialogue, to the bizarre twists led me to believe that I was in store for a big reveal at the end on the lines of ‘It was all a dream’, or ‘She’s hallucinated half of this’. But apparently not, it was all real and several people thought it made enough sense to put on a streaming service.

I don’t normally seek out other reviews for the entertainment I write about in order to avoid accidental plagiarism. However, on this occasion I felt it neccessary and I was lucky enough to get the answer I was looking for. TWitHAtSftGitW is attempting to be a parody of those previously mentioned films/books (particularly The Woman in the Window) by taking the basic premise to a complete extreme. Where the problem occurs, is when it also tries to maintain a serious crime drama within a parody of a crime drama without putting the necessary effort in to balance the two. Now it is possible to parody something while making an engaging story with emotional meaning, see Shaun of the Dead, but I feel as though TWitHAtSftGitW‘s writers were occasionally kept in isolation from the rest of the production team. My reasoning for this is that the premise, plot and characters are absurd, but everything else, from the score, sound design, acting and even promotional material, would have you believe that you’re witnessing a serious meditation on grief and alcoholism.

The whole tone is somber, the actors do an incredible job of selling their characters as real people despite the writing’s best efforts to prevent that. For example, when Kristin Bell’s character hallucinates her dead daughter still being alive, the audience is reminded of the psychological weight and damage that grief can cause. Anna carries around the guilt of her daughter’s death with her everywhere and it impacts her entire life including her relationships with others. We also find out how her daughter died. Her ex-husband took their child to the FBI, where he works with serial killers, and left her in a room with a man dubbed ‘Massacre Mike’ and the rest should be obvious.

What more needs to be said? The contrast is too much to bear, the whole show collapses under the pressure of trying to be two tones at once. You cannot be a complex examination of one of the most devastating and universal human emotions, and also be this clumsy in your delivery. This left me scratching my head for the remainder of the series. I was waiting for her husband to not be real, or for her to have never had a daughter in the first place, or just for the sweet release of not having to sit through any more of this.

The question I have been asking myself and anyone I pester who doesn’t manage to get away in time is why doesn’t this work? As I mentioned, it is possible for a parody to be touching, so what went wrong here? Could it be the genre? There’s some credit to that argument. Grief, loss and mental health disorders don’t exactly lend themselves to comedy and it is very easy to miss the mark and land in offensive territory. However, that feels too dismissive of TWitHAtSftGitW‘s remaining flaws. For me, the primary culprit is the show’s treatment of its main character. While Anna’s grief and mental health struggles paint her as sympathetic, literally everything else she does wipes away all of that.

She obsesses over her attractive neighbour (fine). So she breaks into his home and when confronted demands to read through his texts with his girlfriend (not fine). She provides refuge for a man who is being framed for murder (fine). She then sleeps with him on every horizontal surface in her home (not find and we really didn’t need to see all of it). It is very difficult to maintain sympathy for her when she is doing all of these absurd things, which would have been fine and actually quite funny if the show were much more explicitely a parody. If Anna had leaned more into her stalking tendencies and generally psychotic behaviour, and less into sympathy, it might have worked. However, the show is being pulled in two directions and both halves suffer because of it.

Now wishing to wrap this up nicely, I guess the moral of the story is to decide your tone early, stick to it and don’t leave kids alone with serial killers. Who knew?