Terrie
Since: Apr, 2011
02/12/2022 12:55:36
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Series Wow, that was uneven
TWITHATSFTGITW is a fairly short miniseries (under 4 hours) with a very long title that can't decide what kind of parody it wants to be. Half the time it's the straight-faced, affectionate parody, a sort of psychological thriller version of Cold Comfort Farm or Galaxy Quest, and the other half it seems like it's trying to see how far over the top is can go before you turn it off. (You can probably guess which approach is more to my taste).
It has its solid moments, and it serves well as something to have on while you work on a project that doesn't require your full attention. But when I gave it my focus, I found myself annoyed when it would suddenly veer into the absurd, and the rewatch value is non-existent.
Series Pah, I've Reviewed Stuff with Longer Titles
It feels like an age since I last saw a genre parody of anything. They seemed to die out right around the time of those awful early 2000s Epic Movie and Scary Movie sequels, and they've never recovered. Charlie Brooker had a go at writing a send up of modern Detective genre with A Touch of Cloth, but as you might have gathered from its scatological title, it was a bit of a misfire. I am somewhat delighted by the existence of The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window, which shows there is still something left to mock in this day and age.
That something is psychological thrillers. Specifically those that focus on bougie white women who stumble their way into an inconvenient murder mystery. The Woman in the House perfectly emulates the achingly serious tone of movies like The Girl on the Train and Side Effects. Kristen Bell does a perfect impression of the typical protagonist, a woman who enjoys and an comfy, upperclass, wine pickled lifestyle despite having apparently not worked in years. She soon finds herself especially inconvenienced when she witnesses an apparent murder going on in the house across the street.
When the show is being utterly silly, I was having a blast. It's just the right type of humour where it doesn't interrupt the plot to call attention to itself. Instead it trusts the viewer to notice a lot of the gags, like the titles of books on people's coffee tables, or the protagonist's endless stock of casserole pots. The mystery itself is a fully functional one as well, to the point where if you stripped out the jokes it would be a perfectly serviceable entry into the genre. If anything, it pastichés the genre a little too accurately, and if I had any one criticism of the show, it is that after a while it often forgets it is a parody. This is not an insignificant flaw. Once you get a couple of episodes in, the gags almost completely disappear for long periods of time, as though the show does just wants to be a proper psychological thriller.
It's not terrible when it happens, but I do feel like it is wasting the opportunity. We come to this show for comedy, and there is no point trying to get all serious when you have already primed the audience for a succession of sight gags and jokes. It's like coming to a seafood restaurant that refuses to serve you anything but bread and olives; they may be perfectly fine hors d'oeuvres but it's not what you are there for. At four hours total run time, The Woman in the House is not much of a risk of your time as far as tv shows go. I had a decent time with it, even if I came away from it still hungry for the catch of the day. I guess I'll have to go back to the likes of High Anxiety.