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A woman lies bloodied and twitching her last on the bonnet of a car parked deep in a wood. Another woman arrives home bloodied, gasping with fear and for wine, and starts scrubbing her hands before clearing her flat of – well, everything.
A female voiceover intones that there are two sides to every story. “Which means someone is always lying.” Absolute nonsense, obviously, but it sounds great and more importantly it confirms what we were hoping: that we are in the presence of a glossy, efficient adaptation of a bestselling thriller and it is time to switch off our brains and enjoy (unless you are the type who likes to try to solve the mystery before the characters do, in which case, Godspeed and let me know where you get the energy from).
This particular piece of glossy efficiency is His & Hers, a six-part adaptation of Alice Feeney’s 2020 bestseller of the same name (there are two more in the works – Sometimes I Lie and Rock Paper Scissors), produced by Jessica Chastain and boasting a fine array of actors in the main parts.
Jon Bernthal (The Bear, We Own This City and, for those whose memories stretch this far back, an early and much lamented loss to The Walking Dead) plays small-town detective Jack Harper, in charge of the investigation into the murder. Tessa Thompson (Westworld, Creed) is Anna, a steely former TV news anchor who gets an early sniff of the case, which has occurred in her old home town, and is keen to secure the scoop to restore her status at the station. Her position was taken by a younger, blonder rival while she was mourning the loss of her child. But we are not in the business of exploring unfathomable grief here, simply of providing motivation and narrative propulsion. So we do not dwell on sorrow but enjoy Anna taking the rival’s husband, Richard (Pablo Schreiber), with her as her cameraman and, once she has undermined his marriage and obliquely challenged his masculinity (invisible next to your celebrity wife earning five times your salary, aren’t you?), her after-hours entertainment. Anna is also the woman we saw returning panting and covered in claret at the top of the show.
The next revelation is that Jack and Anna are estranged husband and wife. Though not estranged enough for him to be fine with the fact that she is banging the cameraman. The dead woman – I may as well fill you in on everything while I’ve got you – is Rachel Hopkins (Jamie Tisdale, Isabelle Kusman as a teen), who by all accounts, including Anna’s, was the meanest of mean girls growing up (we get a flashback scene of Anna, who was in her clique at school, watching her trick someone into drinking a glass of urine) and didn’t massively improve thereafter.
Suspects accrue accordingly – including Anna. And, soon afterwards, Jack – who sure does not want to give the cheek swab required of all the officers who dealt with the discovery of Rachel’s body, so as to eliminate them from inquiries. There’s also Rachel’s cuckolded husband, Clyde (Chris Bauer, a veteran character actor rightly hired here, I suspect, for his ability to deliver a line like “She had a mercenary energy that I found intoxicating” without bringing the whole teetering edifice down), plus an unspecified number of cuckolders. And unless the girl who drank urine has moved away, I’d put her on the list, too.
Further complications and potential plot lines include other girls from the clique, Jack’s alcoholic sister Zoe (Marin Ireland) and Anna’s ageing mother – neglected by her, still cared for by Jack – who is losing her grip on reality but whose porous memory I would bet still retains a vital clue or two about secrets long thought buried. The use of dementia as an acceptable form of deus ex machina in thrillers is something I would like to put in a complaint about, but I’m not sure to whom. I should wait and find out whether His & Hers is actually guilty of it first, I suppose.
The twists, they are plentiful. The absurdities, they multiply. The viewerly enjoyment, it increases. The script – intoxicating mercenariness aside – is serviceable. The endeavour is bingeable. Nobody needs more, this early in the year. His-and-hers comfort television is enough.
