His & Hers Is A By-The-Numbers Crime Thriller Saved By Steamy Chemistry
Tessa Thompson and Jon Bernthal nearly get lost in this small-town murder mystery.
Netflix is in the business of keeping our presence on its platform: it doesn’t even really seem to care if we’re watching anymore. There’s a reason the streamer’s new mantra is “What’s Next?” — it’s less about the substance of the stories it has to offer, or their capacity to hold our attention, as it is keeping the binge model running. And it’s why, with some exceptions, one Netflix Original is indecipherable from the next. If you’ve seen one crime thriller, murder mystery, or action romp, you’ve seen most of what Netflix has to offer.
Sadly, His & Hers is not one of those aforementioned exceptions. This glossy thriller about betrayal and lies in a small Southern town has a lot of what you’d expect from any glossy thriller about betrayal and lies. Its mystery kicks off when a beautiful corpse — stabbed dozens of times and dumped on the hood of her car — is found in the middle of the woods, but the question of who murdered this woman comes second to the complications (and myriad infidelities) that her demise dredges up. His & Hers is mostly a show about steamy secrets: everyone is beautiful, everyone is horny, and everyone is a suspect. What makes this show watchable, beyond the play-by-numbers beats of steamy mystery, is Tessa Thompson and Jon Bernthal’s estranged couple caught in the center of this web, and their perverse reconciliation.
That Anna Andrews (Thompson) and Jack Harper (Bernthal) are actually husband and wife is the first of many thorny twists in His & Hers. Jack, a detective who’s lived his entire life in Dahlonega, GA, is one of the first at the scene of the crime. Anna, an investigative reporter, blows in from Atlanta just as her hometown is waking up to the discovery that one of their own has been gruesomely murdered. While the cops tiptoe around the details of the case, Anna relishes her own inside scoop. She hasn’t been seen in Dahlonega for a year, not even by her husband — but she’s quick to tell the world that Jack had a personal connection with the victim, Rachel Hopkins (Jamie Tisdale).
For the record, Anna’s not totally innocent, either. In a town like Dahlonega, everybody knows everybody — and Anna once knew Rachel best of all. She was the queen bee of their all-girls Catholic school, and Anna one of the blessed few in her orbit. Flashbacks to their school days go a long way in informing the chip on Anna’s shoulder, and might even mark her as a suspect. As the one Black woman in an aggressively all-white town, one could argue she’s long seen the dark side of her home and the evil its citizens are capable of. That she seems suspiciously reliant on this case only crystallizes her role in it; it also brings His & Hers close to seizing an identity of its own.
It’d be understandable, even interesting, if Anna committed Rachel’s murder, as she had plenty of motive. The more salacious this story becomes, the closer Anna gets to reclaiming her place at the desk of Atlanta’s top station, usurping the perky blonde reporter who replaced her. The only person who seems more suspicious than Anna is Jack: he and Rachel have been locked in a secret affair for months — in fact, he was the last to see her before her body turned up in the woods. He’s also the last person who should be spearheading the investigation, and he abuses that privilege every step of the way, much to the chagrin of his partner, the uber-competent Priya (Sunita Mani, who deserves a detective series all her own).
His & Hers plays things a little safe, but performances from Thompson and Bernthal make it worthwhile.
His & Hers revels in the concept of errant wives and husbands who retaliate in kind, from Rachel’s widower Clyde (Chris Bauer) to Richard (Pablo Schreiber), the husband of Anna’s work rival, who serves as Anna’s cameraman and after-hours boy-toy. But it’s largely about the pain of secrets, particularly those between Anna and Jack. There’s more than just a mysterious body between them, but years of hurt, culminating in the passing of a child. Thompson and Bernthal breathe life into those vulnerabilities, even when the show’s writing goes lacking. Though Anna proclaims that there are two sides to every story, you can’t help but hope that hers and Jack’s will eventually align, that it’ll be them against the world, for better and worse.
Even if Rachel’s blood is not on their hands, they each have a part to play in her demise. What’s so satisfying about His & Hers is its commitment to the grey areas of this shattered marriage. Thompson and Bernthal remain at the heart of the madness, as bodies pile up and a potential serial murderer emerges, and as the twists in this narrative get all the kinkier. His & Hers may play things too safe to really stand apart from the sea of similar fare, but it touches real brilliance when it fully leans into its racy premise. Barring that consistency, the titular duo pour in enough heart to take this mystery beyond its bingeability.
