His & Hers Series Review: Lies Become Them

Beach-read thrillers have conquered bestseller lists with a simple promise: keep turning pages and we’ll knock your socks off by the end. Alice Feeney‘s 2020 novel “His & Hers” delivered on that promise with a dual-perspective murder mystery built on a deliciously toxic foundation. Now Netflix has adapted it into a six-episode series starring Tessa Thompson and Jon Bernthal, two actors impossible to pin down because they refuse to stay in any single lane. Paired with Lady Macbeth director William Oldroyd, who helms half the episodes while Anja Marquardt takes the rest, the result is an imperfect but ultimately rewarding thriller that stumbles through its middle act before sticking a landing that had me searching under my couch for my jaw.

Anna Andrews (Thompson, Creed) fled Dahlonega, Georgia the first chance she got. Population 7,500, the kind of place where everyone knows your business and difference gets punished. She reinvented herself as an Atlanta news anchor, married a local cop, and built a life as far from her roots as ambition could carry her. Then everything fell apart. When the series begins, Anna has been missing for a year, vanished from her job, her marriage, her mother. She resurfaces just as a former classmate turns up murdered, and the detective assigned to the case happens to be her estranged husband Jack (Bernthal, The Accountant). Coincidence strains credibility. Bodies keep piling up. Everyone’s hiding something.

Thompson and Bernthal circle each other with the wariness of people who know exactly where to plant the knife. When the material gives them room, they’re magnetic, finding the bitter familiarity of a marriage that ended badly but never quite finished. The problem is consistency. Scenes don’t always connect the way they should, with characterizations shifting noticeably from episode to episode. One extended moonlit conversation between the estranged spouses plays like an information dump shot on a different day with awkward energy, both actors looking exhausted in ways that don’t match the footage around it. It’s as if both were flown in from other projects’ sets just to film this scene. Whether this reflects production challenges or editorial intervention, the seams show.

The supporting cast offers stronger footing. Crystal Fox plays Anna’s mother Alice with a delicate touch, navigating a role that could easily tip into melodrama but instead finds something more heartbreaking and complex. Sunita Mani (The Roses) delivers sharp work as Jack’s new partner, an observant cop increasingly baffled by her partner’s blind spots. Anna’s cameraman, Richard (Pablo Schreiber, Skyscraper), radiates the kind of surface charm that feels like a warning sign, while Marin Ireland (The Dark and the Wicked) commits fully to her role as Zoe, a backwoods burnout barely holding her own life together. (An interesting wrinkle, Zoe is Jack’s sister and Anna’s high school best friend, yet in flashbacks we never see Jack…how did they never know one another back then?) These often lively performances remind you what the show can be when it trusts its actors.

Episodes four and five test patience, though. The pacing slackens, the plot mechanics strain credibility, and one particularly bizarre subplot involving DNA evidence falls apart under the slightest scrutiny. Six episodes feels like at least one too many; this story would hit harder at four or five, stripped of the padding that lets attention wander. The show also asks us to accept that Jack could get away with behavior that would end any real detective’s career, a leap that grows harder to make as the stakes rise and he grows more desperate.

And yet. That finale. Everything the show has been building toward clicks into place with a solution so diabolically clever that my complaints dissolved like morning fog. Editing, cinematography, score, performance; every element aligns for a reveal that earns every minute spent getting there. Oldroyd clearly saved his best work for last, orchestrating a sequence that transforms the preceding five hours into setup for a payoff worth the investment. With adaptations of The Housemaid‘s scribe Freida McFadden’s work already in development and additional Feeny novels in various stages of moving ahead, the beach-read thriller is having a moment on screen. His & Hers proves the genre still has teeth…when it’s willing to bite.