HIS & HERS

The Geography of Grief

William Oldroyd keeps returning to one kind of nightmare. Since *Lady Macbeth* and *Eileen*, he’s been drawn to people, often women, boxed into airless lives until the only escape seems to demand some catastrophic moral trade. With the six-episode Netflix version of Alice Feeney’s airport-thriller novel *His & Hers*, he shifts that fixation to the damp, oppressive heat of Dahlonega, Georgia. The story is pulpy and, honestly, a little absurd: an estranged husband and wife each suspect the other of murder. The machinery of the plot strains so hard it nearly flies apart. I still found myself locked onto the damage at its center.



The setup is full-on soap. Anna (Tessa Thompson), a disgraced Atlanta news anchor, heads back to her rural hometown to cover a grisly murder, mostly in the hope that a big story might revive her career. The detective on the case is Jack (Jon Bernthal), her estranged husband. They have been shattered since their child died a year earlier. Anna copes by fleeing. Jack copes by sleeping around. The show fractures the narrative from the start, always nudging you to doubt whichever version of events you’re hearing. Lucy Mangan at *The Guardian* called it a "glossy, efficient adaptation... and it is time to switch off our brains and enjoy." That’s fair enough on the logic front. Still, underneath the twist-happy whodunit, there’s a sadder and gentler story about how grief can make even love feel unreachable.

Bernthal has made a career out of men who look like they might explode without warning. From the violent vigilante of *The Punisher* to his volatile family energy in *The Bear*, he knows how to carry menace in his frame. Here, he turns that expectation sideways. Jack is trying to keep hold of both his badge and his mind, all while dreading the possibility that the woman he still loves may be capable of murder. Look at how Bernthal moves through the precinct: heavy-footed, gaze dropping, like he’s scared of what the case will force him to see. His size stops reading as threat and starts reading as armor against a town that won’t stop watching.



Thompson plays Anna as if every nerve is sparking under the skin. She holds herself bolt upright, like posture alone could protect her from everyone sizing her up. There’s a scene in episode four that gets at the real thing this show wants to touch. Anna and Jack meet in the woods, away from the cameras and away from the police. She tells him he needs to be both victim and hero in his own version of events. The fight spirals into shouting, then collapses into this sudden, desperate intimacy as they end up crying in the front seat of a car. It’s ugly and awkward in exactly the right way. Oldroyd shoots it in suffocating close-up, with no relief and nowhere to hide. For a moment, the bodies and clues stop mattering. What you’re left with is two people seeing that the thing that broke them never brought them closer. It only left them unrecognizable to each other.

Of course, the series eventually has to cash out the mystery. That’s where it starts wobbling. Paste Magazine put it sharply when it said the show "begs audiences to fling logic out of window as it progresses." Hard to argue. The last reveal, which I won’t spoil, though it does ask Crystal R. Fox to do some heavily lifting as Anna’s mother, hangs on motivations that barely survive five seconds of scrutiny. The ending reaches for shock instead of emotional inevitability. Pablo Schreiber, who usually dominates a frame, is barely more than set dressing as Anna’s cameraman.



I’m still not convinced the series fully pulls off what it wants to be. Maybe prestige-grief drama and bargain-bin thriller plotting were never going to sit comfortably together. Still, there’s something compelling about watching actors this good throw themselves at material this unstable. They keep honoring the emotional reality of each scene, even when the writing around them starts to buckle. *His & Hers* is messy television, riddled with holes and blind alleys. But the image that lingers is Thompson and Bernthal, two ruined people orbiting one another in the Georgia heat. Sometimes the stories people tell themselves are more gripping than whatever really happened.