‘My Miniature Wife’ Review: Elizabeth Banks and Matthew Macfadyen in a Playful Sci-Fi Rom-Com

Back in the 1980s, films like Honey, I Shrunk the Kids and Innerspace used then-cutting-edge technology to revisit a premise that had already been popular in the ’50s and ’60s: ordinary people suddenly reduced to miniature size. Those earlier versions were more rudimentary, but also remarkably inventive. Digital tools have since made the trick almost effortless—Ant-Man turned it into a mainstream spectacle—so why not return to those roots and tell a story like this as a comedy?

That’s precisely what My Miniature Wife sets out to do, and at times succeeds. Based on the short story by Manuel Gonzáles, the series blends domestic comedy with sci-fi and frames itself as a love story with a lightly feminist angle. Starring Elizabeth Banks and Matthew Macfadyen, it follows a scientist who accidentally shrinks his wife down to just six inches tall.

Macfadyen (Succession) plays Les Littlejohn, a scientist obsessed with winning a Nobel Prize through an invention that shrinks vegetables so they can be grown in tighter spaces and then restored to their original size. The project shows promise but isn’t quite there yet. His wife Lindy (Banks) is a once-celebrated writer who won a Pulitzer two decades ago and hasn’t produced anything of note since. Their marriage is on the rocks, their daughter can’t stand them, and they fight constantly—but, after therapy, they’ve agreed to give it one more shot.

Everything falls apart when Les receives a major injection of funding and promptly abandons his efforts to fix the relationship. Lindy decides to leave him, and at that exact moment his machine accidentally activates, shrinking her to the size of a wedding cake topper. The catch: Les knows how to shrink things, but has no idea how to reverse the process. In fact, every attempt to do so ends in an explosion.

From there, the show unfolds as a remarriage comedy with a sci-fi twist, relying heavily on visual effects to play with scale. Lindy spends much of her time living in a dollhouse Les builds as a replica of their home. But once she realizes he has no clue how to fix the situation, the problem spirals outward and takes on increasingly chaotic proportions.

A Miniature Wife inevitably leads to every imaginable gag: she has to fend off flies her own size, there’s a dangerous cat in the house, and virtually anything can become life-threatening. Meanwhile, a rotating cast of secondary characters—lovers, scientists, students, journalists, investors, family members—only complicates matters. Les, for his part, spends most of his time manipulating his tiny spouse while failing to complete his invention. Beneath it all, though, these are classic obstacles designed to push the couple back together—this time on equal footing.

The premise is familiar, clean, and flexible enough to explore ideas about female empowerment and the insecurities it can trigger in men threatened by women’s success or independence. On the plus side, the show benefits from two naturally gifted comic performers who know how to extract the most from increasingly absurd situations. Banks carries large stretches of the series essentially on her own (well, alongside a toy), while Macfadyen pushes his absent-minded, chaotic scientist right up to the edge without tipping into caricature.

The problem is that, at ten episodes running 40 to 45 minutes each, it’s simply too much. By mid-season, the number of subplots starts to feel excessive: a menacing journalist, the cat, a scheming scientist who joins Les’s lab, their daughter’s issues, and several others pile up around what is, ultimately, a fairly simple story about a couple that lost its way and is trying to find it again. Episode nine makes this especially clear. Like many shows of its kind, it’s a penultimate flashback that lays bare everything the couple has lost over the years—things they hadn’t known how to recover until this bizarre accident forced them to confront it.