This is spoiler-free review for all eight episodes of The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window, which premieres Friday, Jan. 28 on Netflix.
Kristen Bell skewers Lifetime murder mysteries in new series (hold onto your butts...) The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window. Phew. Yup, with a mouthful of a name reminiscent of parodies like Don't Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood, The Woman in the House (etc.) seems to take many of its cues from Will Ferrell and Kristen Wiig's A Deadly Adoption, which as you'll recall was the comedic duo's elaborate bit that involved doing a Lifetime movie (it actually aired on Lifetime), the joke being that they played it straight. A lot of that is on display here in The Woman in the House, but at a whopping runtime of four hours -- eight half-hour eps that bleed together into one binge movie -- the entire premise swiftly runs out of steam.
Even Ferrell and Wiig's A Deadly Adoption was pushing it, length-wise. This type of shtick was barely able to stretch to those 80 minutes, much less three times that with The Woman in the House. Look, everyone here is committed to the gag, and appropriately soap-ifies their acting to accommodate this specific type of melodrama, but there's a conceptual imbalance here that hinders everything, and it only feels more accentuated the longer the series gets drawn out.
There will be healthy stretches where The Woman in the House just calls things down the middle, where it feels like a bunch of notable names doing Hallmark fare, but then there are elevated moments where it lashes out with full parody like Airplane or The Naked Gun. This radiates an uncertainty of tone, as the season bounces between satire, parody, farce, and just having the joke be that that there is no joke. Admittedly, there are some absolutely hilarious breakouts, moments rife with glorious insanity. The Woman in the House will occasionally drop a nugget so funny that you truly wish the format were different. This is, for sure, a fun genre to play around with, but the delivery system is less than ideal.
Given Bell's particular P.I. past with sleuth series Veronica Mars, her lead role here as a haunted, wine-soaked woman convinced she witnessed a murder feels like a nicely placed gag in its own right. Confident she can piece together the puzzle on her own, Bell is more than at home in snoop mode. And, playing against expectations, her character, who's prone to blackouts and delusions, is actually good at chasing leads and digging up old secrets.
Having lost her family, Bell's Anna has spent years in a bathrobed stupor, drinking one overflowing glass of red wine after another. When hunky widow Neil (Da Vinci's Demons' Tom Riley) and his 9-year-old girl Emma (Samsara Yett) move in across the street, Anna starts to imagine herself fitting into their lives as a way to rebuild her own (while also regaining what she's lost). From there, everything spirals into a mad swirl of murder, betrayal, false accusations, and (believe me) one hell of a bats*** final showdown.
Again, most of the time The Woman in the House just colors within the lines, making everything feel like a legitimate Lifetime movie and that gets pretty dull rather quickly. If the actual crazy moments didn't feel so few and far between then perhaps this amusing experiment would have yielded better results. There's a condensed version of this concept that's probably crazy good.
For fun, check out the trailer for 2015's A Deadly Adoption...
Heathers director Michael Lehmann aptly replicates the overall look and vibe of a "woman in peril" cable movie, leading this lively cast -- including Almost Human's Michael Ealy, Teen Wolf's Shelley Hennig, Veep's Mary Holland, and The Umbrella Academy's Cameron Britton -- through all the red herring beats, providing a fun ensemble filled with nosey best friends, wily con artists, and local Boo Radleys. There's no doubt that everyone's on board for this slice of silliness, it's just not presented in the most beneficial way.
from IGN Reviews https://ift.tt/33Ur7HQ
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