It’s gonna be a long year for consumers of the thriller mini-series. The genre is bigger than ever with the success of programs like “All Her Fault” and “The Beast in Me”. Executives at all the streamers are manically speed-reading mass market paperbacks trying to find the next buzz-worthy hit. Harlan Coben’s “Run Away” already topped charts for Netflix in 2026, and we’re back at it a week later with “His & Hers,” a high-profile adaptation of the 2020 novel of the same name by Alice Feeney. Much like “Run Away,” this is a show that doesn’t think much of your intelligence. It spirals through so many twists and turns in the final episodes that I actually went to check the book summary to see if this ludicrous plot is a product of Feeney’s or showrunner Dee Johnson. Apparently, it’s loyal to the source, which is wacky as hell. It’s one of those stories that makes so little sense when it’s done that it makes you angry, wondering why you wasted so much time on what’s ultimately a pretty gross piece of storytelling, one that uses serious issues like sexual assault, bullying, and dementia in deeply unserious ways.
The true shame is that “His & Hers” wastes the notable talent of its two undeniably gifted leads: Tessa Thompson and Jon Bernthal. At times, they do so much to elevate the material that you want to give it a pass just to reward their efforts, but the show increasingly places so much bad dialogue and illogical character choices in their paths that even they get stuck in the Southern mud of this Georgia tale.
Anna (Thompson) is an up-and-coming Atlanta reporter who returns home to get the big scoop after the violent murder of an old classmate shocks the small town in which she grew up. She runs headfirst into the path of Detective Jack Harper (Bernthal), who turns out to be all of these things: the investigating officer, someone who was sleeping with the victim, and Anna’s estranged husband. The first few episodes are loaded with promise as Johnson and her writers play with shifting suspicion as to whether or not Jack may actually have done it himself, or if it’s possible even Anna knows more about the crime than she first reveals. Both had a connection to the victim, both know more than they’re letting on, both clearly have secrets they’re trying to hide.
Jack’s investigation includes a partner in Priya (Sunita Mani), and the pair inevitably speak to the rich, eccentric husband of the victim, Clyde (Chris Bauer), who becomes an obvious suspect. The case also seems connected to a friend group from Anna’s high school years. Not only did Anna know the victim back then, but we see in flashbacks that both were a party of a circle of mean girls who targeted one poor classmate. Is the murder connected to those days? Jack’s sister Zoe (Marin Ireland) was a part of that group as was a local school headmistress named Helen (Poppy Liu). As the suspects line up, Anna ends up in an affair with a cameraman named Richard (Pablo Schreiber) that complicates things even further given he’s the husband of her competition back at the news station, Lexy (Rebecca Rittenhouse). What this show doesn’t understand about the TV news game could fill an entire review.
We learn quickly that Anna and Jack split over the trauma connected to losing a child. In those scenes, the ones in which Bernthal and Thompson are allowed to play actual emotions and characters, “His & Hers” reveals what it could have been, which almost makes what it pushes aside so much more frustrating. The problem with the glut of streaming thrillers is how much the writing has been pared down to almost nothing but the things that push the plot forward. Yes, it’s hard to compare everything to productions like “Big Little Lies,” “Sharp Objects,” or “Mare of Easttown,” but those work so well because they value things like character, setting, and logic as much as gotcha twists.
It doesn’t help that when “His & Hers” ends, any sort of rigid consideration of how the characters got there will fall apart almost instantly. And then one starts to think about the stops along the way on this twisted path, ones that include the death of a baby and the rape of a teenager, and the hand-waving away of this as just “fun escapism” gets harder to do. Those of us who watch all the Coben mini-series and their imitators don’t mind a bit of suspension of disbelief, but we don’t want to have a bad taste in our mouths when we’re trying to overlook the obvious.
Anna’s voiceover promises a tale of competing perspectives on the same events. She says more than once, “There are at least two sides to every story. Yours and mine. Ours and theirs. His and hers. Which means someone is always lying.” It’s a good hook that promises a complex, character-driven mystery that “His & Hers” is too ludicrous to deliver. “His and Hers and a Team of Crazy Writers” is more like it.
