The Woman in the House not funny

Q: Is The Woman in the House across from a parody?

Netflixs The Woman in the House Across the Street From the Girl in the Window is an incredible spoof on murder mysteries, primarily those featuring amateur female detectives battling personal demons and psychiatric issues.

Q: Is The Woman in the House funny?

While there are some scary moments, its more like a Hallmark movie level of suspense, with some classic Kristen Bell jokes sprinkled in there to ease the tension. While the name is confusing, it is, in fact, a comedy.

Naming your show The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window is a very bold move.

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Is The Woman in the House across from a parody?
Is The Woman in the House funny?
Is The Woman in the House show satire?
Is it worth watching The Woman in the House?

Such a title suggests a parody akin to Airplane!, The Naked Gun, or Scary Movie. One where The Woman in the House would constantly poke fun at recent thrillers like The Girl on the Train, Gone Girl, and Netflix’s own The Woman in the Window.

Which makes it all the more bizarre then that it’s severely lacking when it comes to actual jokes. At times, it doesn’t even seem like it’s trying to make its audience laugh. Or, perhaps, the attempts at humour are so bad they’re not even noticeable. Either way, The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window is, plain and simply, not funny enough.

Over the course of its opening episode, we learn that Anna Whittaker's (Kristen Bell) daughter died in a gruesome fashion, which caused her marriage to forensic psychiatrist Douglas (Michael Ealy) to disintegrate. Three years later, Anna is alone in her huge house, drinking endless glasses of wine, popping prescription pills and staring out of the window at her neighbours, most of whom are now bored by her irrational antics.

But when Neil (Tom Riley), a handsome British widower, moves in across the street with his adorable daughter, Emma (Samsara Leela Yett), Anna slowly starts to build a relationship with the pair. She even dreams of them becoming a family. That’s until she sees a murder in Neil’s house. While those close to Anna insist that it was just a hallucination, she can’t resist starting her own investigation into the death, even though she’s increasingly unstable and doing so immediately puts her in danger.

Kristen Bell as Anna and Shelley Hennig as Lisa in 'The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window'. Photo: Netflix

To be fair to Bell, who sometimes fails to make her mark in comedies that are actually amusing, you can really see that she’s giving it her all as Anna. She does a good job of making you invest in her plight, you’re constantly torn over whether or not she did actually see the murder, and her enthusiastic presence means that spending each 30-minute instalment with her makes for a pleasant enough watch. The problem is that its writers, Hugh Davidson, Larry Dorf and Rachel Ramras, don’t give her the material to actually do anything worthwhile over the show’s eight-episode run.

It’s actually a puzzle why The Woman in the House is a series at all. It never comes close to justifying its four-hour-long running time. Instead it seems much more suitable as a 90-minute movie. Although it arguably doesn’t have enough jokes even for that.

By proceeding as a series, each episode seemingly meanders around, either missing opportunities for gags, or telling the most obvious ones and expecting a pat on the back for doing so, before ending on a cliffhanger designed to keep audiences binging.

There are one or two moments where The Woman in the House actually looks like it’s about to become as outlandish as it should be. In particular, the revelation of how Anna’s daughter died. Ultimately, it’s just too focused on playing safe, and never comes close to being wacky or bizarre enough to warrant such a title.

All eight episodes of The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window will debut on Netflix on January 28

Updated: January 28, 2022, 4:33 AM

Let’s get the title out of the way first because it’s a silly one. Intentionally silly, though, which makes it OK. The Woman in the House Across the Street From the Girl in the Window (Netflix) – and don’t expect me to type that out in full again if you want any actual review in this review – is a mashup of psychological thrillers such as The Woman in the Window and The Girl on the Train. This is not a genre often parodied, and for good reason it turns out.

Anyway, you don’t need to be a 2010s thriller fan to guess the softly lampooned cliches that lie within. The woman on the edge who looks like she has never been within 10ft of any actual edge, the sexy suspenseful vibes, and the hot guy who may or may not be a murderer. What’s really creepy about this “darkly comedic”, “built to be binged” limited series is that its title is the only spoofy thing about it. Otherwise, TWITHATSFTGITW, starring and executive-produced by the usually funny Kristen Bell playing it bewilderingly straight, is not funny at all. Nor is it serious. It doesn’t seem to know what it is. A meta-spoof spoofing a stab at a spoof, perhaps? Ultimately – and I’ve watched all eight episodes – this tonal confusion makes it ludicrous at best and at worst disturbing. And not in the way creators Rachel Ramras, Hugh Davidson and Larry Dorf intended.

The first minute and 20 seconds are satirically quite promising. Anna (Bell), A Woman in a Dressing Gown (signpost: depressed but still sexy), is thwacking raw chicken breasts with a tenderiser to an eerie refrain of Rain, Rain, Go Away. Opening a can of Campbell’s cream of mushroom soup. Making the most unappetising dinner seen in a psychological thriller since the bunny got boiled in Fatal Attraction. Which took decades of simmering before it was collectively digested as a misogynistic trope. Now that is disturbing.

“My husband used to tell me that I have an overactive imagination,” Anna says in a hammy English accent, crowbarring the unreliable narrator trope in nice and early. She drinks too much. Never wears a jacket then complains of the cold. Speaks in a British accent even though she’s not British. Then she switches to her actual American accent. I’m afraid this is as funny as it gets. There are more jokes in Rear Window.

The rest of the opener is a scene-by-scene precis of all that it aims to send up. Anna is falling apart. She drinks bottle after bottle of red wine, without ever appearing to be anything other than sober, bright-eyed and white-toothed. She’s addicted to pills. She hears bumps in the attic and spends most of her time obsessing over the handsome stranger and his nine-year-old daughter who have moved into the house across the street. It’s all so tonally flat that intentionally awful lines such as “There’s so many layers to casseroles. Just like there are so many layers to a person”, end up just being awful.

The reason for Anna’s breakdown? Her daughter died three years ago in what we discover were the most horrific circumstances imaginable. Oh, and the neighbour is grieving his dead wife, too. This, to me, is not solid spoof subject matter unless you really, really know what you’re doing (and even then …). Since her daughter’s death, Anna’s marriage has broken down and her career as a promising artist is over. Although, having seen her work, which covers the walls of her fifty-shades-of-turquoise home, this is no tragedy. (Even this confused me: is Anna’s awful art part of the satire? Or is it actually supposed to be good?)

What we’re not meant to do is wholly trust her. Anna pitches up at the school gate in her dressing gown and slippers, despite no longer having a child to drop off. And she has visions. She sees her dead daughter playing in her bedroom, even asks her for a kiss, which her daughter declines: “Because I’m dead.” “How do I keep forgetting that?” Anna sighs. It’s supposed to be darkly comedic, but it doesn’t land because it’s true. We do keep forgetting people we love are dead after they die. It’s part of the distressing but also magical landscape of grief.

Is there a way of making a genuinely suspenseful “darkly comedic” psychological thriller based on characters propelled by bereavement? This is the niche and slightly ridiculous question I found myself asking after watching TWITHATSFTGITW. Maybe Simon Pegg and Nick Frost could have pulled it off in the 00s, but it hasn’t happened here.

Is The Woman in the House across from a parody?

Netflix's The Woman in the House Across the Street From the Girl in the Window is an incredible spoof on murder mysteries, primarily those featuring amateur female detectives battling personal demons and psychiatric issues.

Is The Woman in the House funny?

While there are some scary moments, it's more like a Hallmark movie level of suspense, with some classic Kristen Bell jokes sprinkled in there to ease the tension. While the name is confusing, it is, in fact, a comedy.

Is The Woman in the House show satire?

The Woman In The House Is The Perfect Thriller Satire.

Is it worth watching The Woman in the House?

Our Call: STREAM IT. The Woman In The House Across The Street From The Girl In The Window is a smart parody of a very parody-ripe genre, but it also works well because Kristen Bell plays the main role with the right degree of seriousness.