After a long time, we dipped our feet into a fascinating new genre of television –– parody thriller! Surely sending Netflix’s content team into a ‘tags’ frenzy, their new show The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window (WHASGW) directed by Michael Lehmann is a treat for the chuckle-deprived soul. Starring Kristen Bell, Michael Ealy, Tom Riley, Mary Holland, Cameron Britton and Samsara Yett, this is a show taking a dig at all its blonde-distressed-and-divorced-women-centric predecessors in a way that has the audience nodding at every humorous take on classic tropes.
There is of course a blonde woman in distress post the loss of her child to a bizarre accident and the subsequent divorce called Anna, played impeccably by Bell who also happens to be an executive producer on the show. She drinks wine and surveils the neighbourhood in pristine white bathrobes showing up at the suburban school on opening day in remembrance of her dead child. She allows her neighbour to set her up on a date only to ditch at the last minute to drink more wine (in a bathtub of course). And her narrator-playing mind strings together motivational words into sentences said in a demure tone to sound fiendishly philosophical. “When your past is so present, how can there be a future? There can’t. You’re just stuck in the present with your past” she wonders, draped on the bathtub like a renaissance portrait.
This particular genre of comedy has definitely caught the attention of the TikTok and Instagram-loving generation who frequent the content of the likes of Nicholas Flannery who imitates these tropes in wildly viral reels set to the Sex and the City and Big Little Lies soundtracks!
Anna drinks ‘a single glass’ of wine every day –– a glass that fits an entire bottle of it! She saves the corks in a bowl and proceeds to sit by her window observing everything unfolding around. One such day is when she claims to witness a murder next-door, only to be called delusional. What ensues is a faux-thriller as Anna embarks on a journey to overcome her ombrophobia (fear of rain) and solve the mystery that is unravelling around her.
Spread over eight episodes, this series keeps you sniggering. There is a handyman Buell of large build and flying hair who has been repairing a single mailbox for over a decade. There is a best friend whose job depends on the lost artistic talents of Anna. There is a devilishly handsome neighbour with a mysterious past. There is a little girl who sells cookies in the neighbourhood and reminds Anna of her own late daughter. There is a snarky neighbour who can’t stop talking about how important her husband’s job is. And there is a white suburban house with an impeccably maintained lawn that has Anna fainting on, every time it rains.
There is tremendous amount of explicit scenes both in Anna’s fantasies and in her life. Shot typically through rain-stained windows and fogged-up stairwells, these scenes made headlines for Bell’s audacious act! As she stalks her ex on Instagram and poses in her underwear to gain access to a suspiciously handsome hunk’s profile, the desperation shines through in every way the makers intended. Anna is a painter who draws flowers that are supposedly sold for thousands of dollars. The frenzy with which she reaches her blank, unused canvas after feeling ‘inspired’ by flowers delivered to her doorstep by her handsome neighbour, had us ROFL-ing a bit!
The show does get a little lost in keeping to the theme that it originally imagined, taking a slightly darker turn WHASGW does leave a large window open for a second season. Anna seems to have moved on from wine by the end of the season but things might have gotten worse? Only season two shall tell!