His & Hers, All Her Fault: Pulpy trash thrillers distract with plot twists and turns

You know this show. You’ve seen it before. At least three dozen times.

A woman is murdered in a small town. The investigation unearths some long-dormant but unresolved traumas and secrets. That past has something to do with the lead character’s history.

Here we go again. And again. And again.

Are we not sick of these grim, twisty murder mysteries yet? The ones with all those laden-with-significance shots of trees in a forest as a lazy shortcut for “atmosphere”. And characters staring off into the distance, trying to not remember something unpleasant.

Where every episode ends with a banger of a twist, more ludicrous than the last, almost trolling a viewer, daring them to stop the autoplay before the next episode starts.

The “oh, gasp” mystery genre has become an untameable beast, supercharged by streaming platforms which only care about completion rates. Where the forward momentum of the plot is the only thing that matters.

They almost all, inevitably, lead to an ending too stupid to make logical sense. By then, the series will have done its job – it kept you in its clutches until the very end. Success! Someone somewhere got a gold star.

The advantage that TV as a medium had over film, theatre and most other forms is its longevity. Instead of two hours, it has at least six episodes, sometimes 100 or more, to build out its world. The way you do that is through characters, not story.

Characters are what makes good television, not how many plot twists you can cram into a season. But somewhere along the way – ahem, the streaming era – the people making TV decided to upend the formula, so now, writing characters has become secondary.

We have been bombarded with mediocre shows, mostly miniseries, that are about plot mechanics, and because they don’t need to hang around for another year, few notice that in the end, it was a waste of time. A quick injection of curious-cat vibes and memes about Nicole Kidman’s coat.

That, if you’re unlucky enough to remember, was The Undoing, an overwrought murder mystery dressed up as prestige TV because it had movies stars and was on HBO.

Every episode ended on a cliffhanger reveal, which would then be unwound within five minutes of the next episode, and, in the end, the killer was the person you thought it was at the beginning. What was the point?

But you were so distracted by the flashbangs, you may not have realised that none of the characters had any depth. Hence, the coat memes.

Netflix’s His & Hers, released yesterday is of a similar template, and it is such a waste of its two leads’ talents. When you have Tessa Thompson and Jon Bernthal, it’s offensive to have them play second fiddle to a silly murder mystery.

Based on a book by Alice Feeney, the trashy thriller is about Anna and Jack, estranged wife and husband, she a TV reporter and he a police detective, both investigating the violent death of a woman to whom they both have a connection.

That inevitably complicates their involvement in the solving of the crime, to a degree that beggars disbelief. You’re supposed to just go along with it even though it it’s dumb, and the only person that seems notice something is off is his cop partner, Priya (Sunita Mani).

There’s also the emotional burden that Anna and Jack have lost a child, a far more interesting point that is barely explored. Every time they get somewhere with it, along comes that dumb murder mystery plot, shoving out of the way any attempt at actual character development.

It labours itself to a final reveal that makes you feel like the writers believe everyone watching is an idiot – although the real culprit is probably Feeney’s book, which has the same denouement.

The Sarah Snook-led series All Her Fault did this too. It also threw up loads of whizzbangs plot twists – again, a truly birdbrained ending – so it didn’t have to bother giving its ensemble cast of characters much shading beyond generic archetypes of “misunderstood”, “kind of shady” and “put-upon mum”.

Even Snook’s lead character, Marissa, comes to not much more than ferocious mama bear panicked about her missing child. That’s what the plot needed her to be, but the harder thing to do would be to build the story around what the character needs.

Instead, these lightweight shows, which also includes The Perfect Couple and anything Harlan Coben has his name on, have as much substance as the pulpy airport novels they’re either adapted from or try to mimic.

Even when the performances are decent, as much as they can be when there’s not much nuance to work with, overall, it’s so unsatisfying and cheap. They’re best enjoyed on a long-haul flight and then quickly discarded and forgotten.

That’s not good TV. The streamers don’t need them to be, but audiences should demand better.