‘His and Hers’ Review: Netflix Delivers Another Twisty Small-Town Murder Mystery

Another murder, another crime series adapted from a novel and built around solving it: so far, nothing new under the sun. But if you look more closely, a few details about His and Hers stand out. The project was developed by William Oldroyd, who also wrote and directed several episodes, a British filmmaker best known for Lady Macbeth and Eileen. The cast is led by Tessa Thompson (Selma, Creed, Hedda), alongside the ever-intense Jon Bernthal (Daredevil, The Accountant, We Own This City). That veneer of prestige might suggest that His and Hers is aiming for something more distinctive than the usual whodunit designed for crime-fiction addicts, but in practice that promise is only partially fulfilled. Aside from a handful of dramatic scenes that probe the emotional core of its two leads, the series rarely strays far from familiar formulas.

Based on the 2020 novel of the same name by British writer and former journalist Alice Feeney, His and Hers uses as its narrative hook the experiences of a TV news anchor who chooses to cover a case that hits uncomfortably close to home. The murder takes place in her hometown, and the victim was a close friend during her teenage years. Anna (Thompson) has spent the past year off the air after losing a baby just a few months old. When she returns to the Atlanta network where she once worked, she finds her job occupied by another journalist, Lexy (Rebecca Rittenhouse). Anna pushes to cover the murder case dominating the news, convinced that doing so—thanks to her local connections—will help her reclaim the position she believes was stolen from her by the “ambitious” (as she sees it) Lexy.

The victim, stabbed forty times, is Rachel, Anna’s former schoolmate. The personal connections do not end there. When Anna arrives in her hometown—a predominantly white enclave in a state with a large Black population—she discovers that the detective in charge of the case is Jack Harper (Bernthal), her husband. Although they are not divorced, they have been emotionally estranged since the death of their child: he stayed behind, while she vanished from his life. More complications soon emerge when it is revealed that Jack was involved with Rachel. The investigation is thus hampered by Jack’s efforts to muddy any trail that might lead back to him, the strain of working around Anna—who actively interferes with his job—and the secrets Anna herself harbors about the past, including her fraught teenage relationship with Rachel and other girls from school, among them Jack’s sister Zoe (Marin Ireland).

All of this creates a narrative stew that feels closer to a soap opera than to a procedural, largely because everyone involved—the suspects, the investigators, the press—knows one another intimately. Added to this mix are Lexy; her husband Richard (Pablo Schreiber), who works as a cameraman and has a closer connection to Anna; Rachel’s odd and unsettling widower (Chris Bauer); Anna’s ailing mother Alice (Crystal Fox); the more level-headed Detective Priya (Sunita Mani); and a series of revelations from the past that surface as the investigation lurches forward in a manner that is often clumsy, arbitrary, and occasionally absurd. It becomes clear that Oldroyd and his team are far less interested in detective logic than in prying open the pressure cooker of this “small town, big hell” and staging the volatile relationships among its residents.

Where His and Hers finds firmer ground—and where it earns some of its prestige credentials—is in the scenes shared by Thompson and Bernthal. Gradually, the anger and resentment between their characters give way to confessions of deeper, more painful wounds tied to their shared history. Beyond that, arguably the only area where the series truly departs from the formula, His and Hers settles into a repetitive pattern that includes loose ends, convenient discoveries, and plot turns that defy basic logic. It also leans heavily on a gallery of cruel, abrasive, and thoroughly unpleasant characters. In its eagerness to make everyone a suspect, the series offers an ever-expanding lineup of possible culprits, each more dubious than the last—including, at times, the two protagonists themselves.

So much so that when the resolutions arrive—plural, not singular—who actually committed the murders, and why, ends up mattering very little. What remains are six episodes that, while competently told and intermittently gripping, fail to break free from the well-worn conventions of contemporary crime fiction. Themes initially hinted at—racism among them—are pushed aside in favor of the characters’ unresolved grudges, some of which take on genuinely traumatic dimensions. The girls’ adolescence, explored through flashbacks, becomes increasingly important, not because it offers fresh insight into that stage of life, but because it reinforces a familiar idea once again: cruelty is learned early, and it tends to last.