ConnexionNetflix's His & Hers Review
If you’re from the South like I am, you know the sound: a light, echoing hum that softly screams whenever the temperature gets above 75. A sign of summer. Of languid days filled with both dread and possibility. Cicadas - those insects found all across the Eastern seaboard of the United States – are singing their song, which is both suffocating and soothing at the same time.
In Netflix’s new limited series His & Hers, based on the bestselling novel by Alice Feeney, cicadas are omnipresent whenever the characters step outside. It’s a small detail but one that reinforces the consistent, relentless Southern gothic nature of the show. Led by Tessa Thompson (Creed, Thor: Ragnarok) and Jon Bernthal (The Punisher, The Bear), His & Hers is the latest offering from Netflix’s seemingly unabated conveyor belt of glossy murder mysteries starring A-list talent.
But whereas many of those shows leave something to be desired in terms of execution and storytelling (see The Beast in Me, Pieces of Her), His & Hers, helmed by showrunners Dee Johnson (Fellow Travelers, Nashville) and William Oldroyd, blows past the usual paint-by-numbers whodunnit trap and quickly develops into something much more than the sum of its parts.
Thompson and Bernthal star as Anna and Jack, an estranged married couple reeling after the death of their young daughter. Anna, a news anchor in Atlanta, disappeared a year prior to the events of the show in an attempt to deal with her grief, leaving Jack (a detective) to move in with his sister in their hometown of Dahlonega, GA. Anna reappears to cover the story of a local woman who was stabbed to death, with Jack assigned to lead the investigation.
Plotwise, what follows is a pretty typical mystery that sees bodies pile up, secrets revealed, and more than a few expository flashbacks. But that’s where the similarities between His & Hers and most psychological thrillers end.
Bernthal and Thompson are at the top of their game here. Every scene they share crackles with yearning, grief, and a million layers of personal history. After losing their daughter, they lost each other, and being reunited both rips open old wounds and creates new ones.
Thompson projects a quiet strength, constantly balancing the sorrow of a mother who’s lost her only child with the persistent drive of someone destined to make a name for herself career-wise. For his part, Bernthal (with a subtle but impeccable Southern accent, something woefully absent in many a movie and TV show - I’m looking at you Benoit Blanc) shines as a man teetering on the brink. It just so happens that Jack was having an affair with the murder victim and was with her the night of the killing. This revelation leads to a cascade of poor decisions that compromises the investigation and paints Jack as one of the prime suspects.
While many of Jack’s attempts to hide his involvement border on the ridiculous (he swabs his niece’s mouth for DNA instead of his own, he constantly shouts down Priya, his investigation partner, when she asks simple questions) these lapses are forgivable - this is a soapy murder mystery after all.
To understand what truly makes His & Hers great, we have to dig into what the show is actually about. And to do that, we must talk spoilers. So turn away (and be sure to come back later!) if you don’t want to know who the murderer is and how the show ends.
Full Spoilers ahead for all six episodes of His & Hers.
When you approach a show like His & Hers, it’s easy to take it on its face as a bingeable, glossy mystery where everything is wrapped up by the finale. And it is! But it’s also much more.
The central mystery (who killed Rachel Hopkins?) is laid out at the very beginning of the show and resolved in an entertaining, if fairly typical fashion.
But Anna and Jack’s involvement, while unclear at the beginning, is slowly revealed to be much more than meets the eye. In short, Rachel was part of a high school “Mean Girls” group that also included Anna, Jack’s sister Zoe, eventual school headmistress Helen, and outcast Catherine. One by one, the girls, now adults, are murdered. The series leads us to believe that they’re all killed by a grown-up Catherine, now calling herself Lexi and posing as Anna’s rival news anchor.
In between the action, we’re treated to scenes of Jack and Anna leaving a thousand things unsaid with sparing glances and fleeting moments together. By the final episode, everything neatly fits together. Lexi, who supposedly killed out of revenge for the bullying she suffered decades ago, is dispatched by Priya after a brutal fight with Anna.
Pretty clean resolution, right? Well, there’s still almost an entire episode to go at this point so you know nothing is as it seems.
We flash forward to a year later. Anna and Jack are back together. She has her dream job and is pregnant. They’re co-parenting Jack’s orphaned niece and all seems right with the world. They go back to Dahlonega to visit Alice, Anna’s mother, who’s showing signs of dementia. Alice leaves a letter for Anna and - TWIST - it’s revealed that Alice, not Lexi, is the real killer. After viewing a video tape of Anna being raped as a teenager and the other girls doing nothing to stop it, Alice decided to hunt down all of the girls as payback.
This in and of itself is not exceptional. Red herrings in murder mysteries are nothing new. But the end of His & Hers both elevates the wow factor and sends a message with a capital M. Alice - who spent her life overlooked and discarded by everyone in her community, was accidentally responsible for the death of Anna and Jack’s daughter, and faked her dementia as a cover story for the murders - decided to give her daughter the life and opportunity she never had herself. As she says to Anna when explaining her motivations:
“Killing Rachel brought you home.
Killing Helen kept you here.
Killing Zoe gave you the family you lost.”
Twisted as they were, Alice’s actions are a macabre meditation on motherhood itself. And thus the true nature of His & Hers comes into focus: the lengths parents will go to protect their children and the devastation that comes when they’re unable to do so. This theme gradually builds throughout the series and explodes in a truly shocking denouement that makes you want to go back and re-watch the entire show.
His & Hers doesn’t reinvent the murder mystery. But it does kick it into a gear that’s far too rare in the genre nowadays. It’s entertaining, gripping, and heartbreaking from beginning to end, and achieves the rare feat of making you think long after the credits roll.
