Jon Bernthal and Tessa Thompson in 'His & Hers.' Courtesy of Netflix Share on Facebook Share on X Google Preferred Share to Flipboard Show additional share options Share on LinkedIn Share on Pinterest Share on Reddit Share on Tumblr Share on Whats App Send an Email Print the Article Post a Comment Logo text The enticing combination of well-regarded source material, an elusive auteur tackling television for the first time, and a pair of photogenic stars prone to interesting choices yields the first disappointment of the new year with Netflix's His & Hers. Writer-director William Oldroyd, who found intriguing angles within the gothic romance (Lady Macbeth) and feminist prison noir (Eileen), is thoroughly thwarted by Alice Feeney's book, fumbling the mystery's structuring device and failing to build any momentum on the way to an inept finale with two endings - one stupid and obvious, the other merely stupid. Related Stories Movies Guillermo del Toro to Return to Sundance Film Festival for Restored Screening of Debut 'Cronos' TV Nick Kroll Comedy 'A Hundred Percent' Gets Netflix Greenlight His & Hers The Bottom Line No one's. Airdate: Thursday, January 8 (Netflix)Cast: Tessa Thompson, Jon Bernthal, Pablo Schreiber, Crystal Fox, Sunita Mani, Rebecca RittenhouseCreator: William Oldroyd The resulting series is, at least until the actively irritating finale, more generic than overtly bad, calling to mind various forgettable Netflix limited series filmed in Southern tax havens and forgotten by all but television critics. Put a different way, if your series keeps reminding me of a less interesting version of, like, the 2022 Michelle Monaghan doppelgänger dud Echoes, the chances of your series having a memorable afterlife are limited. It's up to leads Tessa Thompson and Jon Bernthal to try, without much success, to bring depth to what is five episodes of predictable plot mechanics and the finale faceplant. Unfortunately, with almost no chemistry between them, they're lost in a sea of unconvincing misdirections that should have been a 90-minute feature, if that. The series begins with a murder in tiny Dahlonega, an indistinct town an hour from Atlanta. The crime is notable because the victim was stabbed many times and staged with a taunting message, and because nobody in Dahlonega has ever had to deal with a murder before, other than Jack Harper (Bernthal), a detective and native son who once worked in Atlanta. This gives Jack an excuse to bark really obvious orders at his partner Priya (Sunita Mani, who feels like she could be in a different show that I'd probably have preferred), whom he calls "Boston" for unclear reasons. The case catches the attention of Anna (Thompson), a former Atlanta news anchor who dropped off the map following the death of her child. Anna returns unexpectedly after a year's absence, during which she was replaced as the face of the network by Lexy (Rebecca Rittenhouse, bad, but not her fault). Anna sees the Dahlonega murder as her opportunity to recapture her position, in part because she grew up in Dahlonega, so she commandeers Richard (Pablo Schreiber, bad, but not his fault), a cameraman who just happens to be Lexy's husband. The plot of His & Hers is packed with "just happens to be" contrivances. The murder victim just happens to be Anna's high-school frenemy, Jack just happens to have his own relationship with the victim, and Jack and Anna just happen to be married - though that's more of a technicality than anything else, since she ghosted him for a year as well. Because of all these "just happens to be" contrivances, it takes very little time before both Anna and Jack are suspects in the murder. Or at least that's what's suggested by the plot description for His & Hers, which I found confusing because there wasn't a single second in the series that gave me reason to think either of them was a killer. Instead, I spent most of the time being distracted from any reasonable suspects by how bad Jack is as a detective and how bad Anna is as a reporter. The shared ineptitude, more than actual emotional friction, ended up being the reason I believed them as a couple. They deserve each other, and they both deserve better from the series. Episodes are bound together by banal introductory voiceover, in which our narrator recites ominous clichés that, like everything in His & Hers, border on parody. The first episode, for example, begins with the philosophically specious declaration, "There are at least two sides to every story. Yours and mine. Ours and theirs. His and hers. Which means someone is always lying." What about Yours, Mine & Ours? That's a different movie. The book is structured so that both Jack and Anna are given their perspectives, their sides - "his and hers," as it were. The narration, though, comes from an unclear and ungendered perspective, meant to keep you guessing. Somewhere along the line, Oldroyd or Netflix or the series' more experienced TV writers, including Dee Johnson (N