His & Hers Review – This Glossy Thriller Is Ideal New Year TV
By the time January rolls around, television often serves a very specific purpose. The excesses of December are over, ambition is in short supply, and viewers want something absorbing without being demanding—a show that grips, distracts, and perhaps shocks a little, but never asks too much emotional labour in return. His & Hers, Netflix’s six-part adaptation of Alice Feeney’s bestselling 2020 novel, understands this assignment perfectly.
Twisty, faintly absurd, and undeniably bingeable, His & Hers is not here to redefine the television thriller. Instead, it delivers a sleek, high-gloss version of a familiar genre, confident that what it lacks in subtlety it more than compensates for in pace, star power, and narrative misdirection. It is, in the best sense of the phrase, comfort television for people who like their comfort laced with murder.
Blood on the Bonnet, Wine in the Sink
The series opens with a pair of images designed to do exactly what they do: hook you instantly. In a dark, wooded clearing, a woman lies bloodied and dying on the bonnet of a car, twitching as life drains from her. Elsewhere, another woman staggers into her flat, equally bloodied, breathless with panic and a thirst for wine. She scrubs her hands, wipes surfaces, clears away… well, everything.
A voiceover informs us that there are two sides to every story—and therefore, someone is always lying. This is, philosophically speaking, nonsense. But as a mission statement for a glossy psychological thriller, it works beautifully. The show is not interested in epistemology or moral nuance. It wants you to settle in, suspend disbelief, and enjoy the ride.
From this opening, His & Hers makes its intentions clear. This is a story built on secrets, withheld information, and the steady drip-feed of revelations. Logic will occasionally wobble. Characters will make questionable decisions. But if you are willing to stop trying to outsmart the narrative and let it wash over you, the rewards are plentiful.
A Familiar Murder, Efficiently Told
At the centre of the story is the murder of Rachel Hopkins, a woman whose reputation precedes her in every direction. As a teenager, she was the meanest of mean girls; as an adult, she appears to have lost none of her capacity for cruelty. Flashbacks depict her humiliating others for sport, including a particularly memorable scene in which she tricks a girl into drinking a glass of urine. The show labours this point hard: Rachel made enemies. Lots of them.
Enter Detective Jack Harper, tasked with leading the investigation in the small town where Rachel grew up—and where she has now returned to die. Jack is played by Jon Bernthal, an actor who has built a career on simmering intensity and moral ambiguity. Here, he brings a familiar combination of physical authority and emotional volatility, suggesting depths that may or may not be relevant but are always compelling to watch.
Running parallel to the police investigation is the perspective of Anna, a former television news anchor played by Tessa Thompson. Anna is sharp, driven, and visibly wounded by recent professional and personal losses. Having been sidelined at work while grieving the death of her child, she is desperate for a comeback—and the Rachel Hopkins murder, which happens to take place in her old hometown, looks like her ticket back to prominence.
From the outset, His & Hers establishes a dual narrative structure: his version of events, hers, and the uneasy tension between them. It is a structure that thrives on contrast rather than convergence, encouraging the audience to constantly reassess loyalties and assumptions.
Marriage, Estrangement, and Mutual Suspicion
The show’s central twist arrives early enough to feel less like a spoiler and more like a thematic foundation: Jack and Anna are estranged husband and wife. Their shared history is thick with resentment, unresolved grief, and unspoken accusations. The murder investigation becomes, in effect, an extension of their marriage—a space where power, control, and truth are constantly contested.
This dynamic gives His & Hers much of its energy. Jack resents Anna’s intrusion into the case, particularly when she begins reporting on it with thinly veiled self-interest. Anna, for her part, has little patience for Jack’s moral posturing, especially when it comes to his discomfort with her personal life. She arrives in town with her cameraman, Richard—played by Pablo Schreiber—and swiftly begins an affair with him, destabilising both his marriage and Jack’s emotional equilibrium in the process.
The show is refreshingly uninterested in moral judgement here. Anna’s choices are presented less as ethical failings than as narrative accelerants. Her grief, while acknowledged, is not deeply explored; it functions primarily as motivation, not subject. This is not a series that wants to linger on pain. It wants to move.
A Town Full of Suspects
As Rachel’s past is excavated, the suspect list grows accordingly. Her husband Clyde, portrayed by Chris Bauer with relish, is a cuckolded widower whose eloquent bitterness makes him instantly compelling. Bauer delivers lines like “She had a mercenary energy that I found intoxicating” with such conviction that the show briefly risks tipping into self-parody—but pulls back just in time.
Then there are Rachel’s former school friends, now adults carrying the scars of teenage cruelty into middle age. Jack’s alcoholic sister Zoe adds another layer of familial dysfunction, while Anna’s ageing mother—still cared for by Jack despite the estrangement—introduces a familiar but effective thriller device: the unreliable memory.
The series toys heavily with the idea that the past is never truly buried, particularly in small towns where everyone knows everyone else’s business. Secrets resurface. Old wounds reopen. And the audience is encouraged to suspect everyone, including the people ostensibly tasked with uncovering the truth.
The Pleasures of Excess
His & Hers is at its best when it leans unapologetically into excess. The twists come thick and fast, some more plausible than others. Revelations pile up. Coincidences accumulate. Characters behave in ways that are sometimes baffling, but always dramatically useful.
This is not a show that aspires to realism. It aspires to momentum. Each episode ends with a hook designed to propel you into the next, and it is remarkably effective at doing so. The scripts are competent rather than dazzling, but they understand the mechanics of suspense. Information is doled out strategically, perspectives shift, and just when you think you have a handle on the story, something else is yanked from under your feet.
There is also a certain pleasure in recognising the genre’s familiar tricks and watching them deployed with confidence. The use of dementia as a potential deus ex machina, for instance, raises ethical eyebrows but fits squarely within thriller tradition. Whether His & Hers ultimately crosses that line is almost beside the point; the possibility alone is enough to keep viewers guessing.
Performances That Know the Assignment
The cast is uniformly strong, not because they transcend the material, but because they understand exactly what it requires. Bernthal’s Jack is prickly, defensive, and increasingly compromised, his reluctance to provide a routine cheek swab hinting at secrets he would rather not examine. Thompson’s Anna is cool, sharp-edged, and emotionally armoured, her ambition worn openly rather than apologetically.
Their chemistry—strained, hostile, occasionally intimate—is the series’ backbone. Around them, the supporting cast adds texture and colour, particularly Marin Ireland as Zoe, whose alcoholism is portrayed with a weary familiarity that avoids melodrama.
Jessica Chastain’s role as executive producer is felt in the show’s polish and its commitment to strong female perspectives, even when those perspectives are morally ambiguous. His & Hers is not interested in making its women likable. It is interested in making them interesting—and that distinction matters.
Style Over Substance, and Proud of It
Visually, the series is sleek and controlled, favouring muted palettes, moody lighting, and carefully composed shots that reinforce its atmosphere of unease. The production design leans into the contrast between Anna’s metropolitan career and the claustrophobic intimacy of her hometown, a place where history presses in from every side.
The direction is efficient rather than showy. Nothing lingers longer than necessary. Scenes exist to advance plot or deepen suspicion, not to luxuriate in character psychology. This may disappoint viewers hoping for a more profound exploration of grief, marriage, or identity—but it will delight those who want to be entertained.
January Television, Perfectly Calibrated
Ultimately, His & Hers succeeds because it knows what it is and what it isn’t. It is not prestige television masquerading as a thriller. It is not a genre deconstruction. It is a highly polished adaptation of a bestselling novel, designed to be consumed quickly and enjoyed without overthinking.
In January, that is more than enough. After the emotional demands of the holidays and the intellectual ambitions of awards-season television, His & Hers offers a reset: six episodes of intrigue, duplicity, and escalating absurdity that ask only for your attention, not your soul.
The twists are plentiful. The logic occasionally wobbles. The enjoyment steadily increases. Sometimes, especially at the start of a new year, that is exactly the kind of television we need.
His & Hers is streaming now on Netflix.