The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window is an obnoxious title to have. If you put aside the perversion to make someone work this hard to answer, “what did you stream this weekend?” and start referring to the series as “The Woman in the House” maybe we can take this conversation forward.

For a psychological thriller parody, The Woman in the House takes itself too seriously. Call it trying too hard or being too clever, the joke falls flat since you realize it ticked the box with the dad. My old man who cannot distinguish between my name and my sister’s relished the one episode he saw while I was eating dinner. No causal understanding of the first four episodes, he just thrived on the vibes of the fifth episode alone. And you’re telling me to believe this a parody? Come on.

What it is not, is a total failure; The Woman in the House titillates. Despite being a pastiche of Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca (1940), Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window (1954), and Paula Hawkins's The Girl on the Train (2021), the Woman in the House puts a fairly vanilla front on the thriller end of things. It simplifies the genre and restricts it to very limited artefacts— the casserole and the ceramic dish, chocolate bars, wine bottle corks; and tries its best to restrict to them through the vivid overthinking imagination of Anna Whittaker (Kristen Bell).

A full time alcoholic and a retired painter, Anna lives alone in a beautiful bungalow at Canterbury Street. She doesn’t ever vacuum the house nor does the dishes and yet finds the house impeccably clean and stunning at all times. She’s also as my mother would call her “butterfingers”, she's clumsy and breaks one too many vintage ceramic oven-safe bowls while offering to bring one and all chicken casserole, that yet again we see no sights of preparation. Honestly, this woman possesses magical powers to cause at least 5-6 ceramic bowls to break, yet, we never see her replace any. She has more than enough stock of these bowls through the 8-episode series.

Despite being a colossal, yet beautiful fuck up, she has great company in her life— the handyman Buell (Cameron Britton) who’s been repairing her mailbox for 7 episodes, her ex-husband Douglas (Michael Ealy) who’s actually a sane, kind, nice individual and is purely in the series for vibes, and her friend Sloane (Mary Holland) who loves her enough to call her behaviour out. Anna drinks enough red wine (to make you want to be an alcoholic with her), imagines unlikely situations playing out (the epitaph reads differently every time) and avoids her therapist (like me). She's had grief to blame but if you're anything like her then you can blame the pandemic. It's all the same at this point.

All’s well (actually it isn’t but we’ll pretend it is) until a hot (also) single dad Neil Coleman (Tom Riley) moves in with his daughter Emma (Samsara Yett) across the street from her house (get the title?). Anna’s life turns around cause she sees her chance at getting back at what she lost- a hot man with a child who is past her potty training years. The meet-cute is short-lived as Neil is joined by his gorgeous flight attendant girlfriend Lisa Maines (Shelley Hennig) and Anna realizes she has no shot whatsoever with stepping up to be a milf to Neil and mommy to Emma.

As expected, a murder follows and all clues trace to the remaining characters alive and the six episodes are filled with putting together the jigsaw puzzle to point at the murderer. When you do finally spot the murderer and try to place the series of events you wonder, “WTF?” cause a lot of things don’t add up nor make sense. But hey, it’s Netflix so they must have a reason, right? If not reason, Netflix operates on vibes and this series is full of it.

Truth is, the writing in The Woman in the House is lazy. You can use pastiche as a form to establish your idea but you will still need to fill it with matter that makes it into a murder mystery. The Woman in the House lacks that thought. If you’re trying to make a TV show with eccentric ideas, see it through. Don’t half-ass it with a “parody” and unanswered questions.

One of the bigger questions that bothers you after the reveal of the killer is the cover-up of the original murder. How exactly do you make that happen and also subsequently tie it together with the shreds of evidence we are given through the six episodes-somehow- all of this is left to the viewer’s imagination. Lazy writing makes for lazy viewing in turn makes for lazy reviewing. I don’t care for the answers, much as the screenplay writers don’t care for the series to add up and make sense. We all live happily ever after.

The production design in the series delivers the parody more than the writing. If I have to point out one thing that adds to what the creators intend on creating it’s the sets and the location. The make-up, however, doesn’t add up— how is Anna pissed drunk and on medication for depression but still waking up looking fabulous? I’d like the same recipe for wine, please. On the acting front, everyone delivers a solid performance, some win, somewhere.

Despite all the criticism and ranting towards The Woman in the House, I’d still recommend streaming it. For what it’s worth, vanilla is actually a damn delicious flavour. Just like vanilla, the series tastes ridiculously warm. It may not be the sharpest, smartest, wittiest series to have come out and it also may go down as an utterly forgettable one-time watch series at best—but it does what it’s supposed to do— entertain and make you forget life in its present form. It’s easy to get into and easy to get out of, it treats the senses with the question without making you look distractedly at your phone, which is a solid win by my book.

The series is available for streaming on Netflix in India.

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