Spoofing what Laura Miller from Slate calls the “domestic suspense genre,” the mysteriously satirical show “The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window” exuded immediate success and contemplation since its release on Jan. 28. After comfortably holding the number one spot for numerous days, the Netflix original now ranks fourth in Netflix’s Top 10 U.S. Today for a plethora of reasons.
The show is a combination of parody and drama, constantly balancing the line between campy over-the-topness and thrilling uncertainty. It falls under the ‘tramedy’ (tragedy and comedy) genre which has been paved by other Netflix originals like “Dead to Me,” — which rely on comedy embedded in deep, jarring moments of grief. “The Woman in the House” portrays the downward spiral of an unstable woman battling with the aftermath of loss and nods toward the ‘tramedy’ genre while raising the stakes.
The dismantled female detective troupe meets the outlandishness and melodramatic humor of Ryan Murphy’s “American Horror Story” throughout the entirety of the show. It pleasantly merged into what star and executive producer, Kristen Bell, described as a “a satirical psychological drama.”
“The Woman in the House” opens with Anna (Kristen Bell) — a middle-aged woman working to recollect her life after her daughter’s untimely death. With nothing but time, medication and an unending supply of red wine at her disposal, Anna spends her days spying on the idealized family living directly across the street.
If you’re familiar with novels and movies such as “The Woman in the Window,” “The Women on the Train” and other self-appointed detective storylines, the plot’s progression seems quite obvious. After stalking, drinking, pill-popping and stalking some more, Anna witnesses through a fog of substances and paranoia the murder of her neighbor’s girlfriend. However, her self-medication and grieving hysteria makes her a less-than-ideal witness. Unsurprisingly, her claims are cast aside as false musings formed from the over imaginative psyche of a damaged woman.
From the first episode, Anna’s reality is immediately blurred. This leads to an exciting uneasiness throughout the season, where everything seen from Anna’s perspective is knowingly tainted in a hallucinogenic haze and information collected from sight alone is deemed seemingly unreliable.
On par with the classic troupe, not only is Anna deemed insane and unreliable, but she injects herself into the unfolding crime in pursuit of the truth. However, while other books or films ask audiences to suspend disbelief and enter the intensely dramatic world of the unbelievable women, “The Women in the House” shines a bright light on just how curiously absurd this genre can be.
As a result, the largest indication of the show’s comedically satirical tone, besides its jocularly long title, is its constant outrageousness.
It’s all very meta: the woman across the street from the girl in the window is being watched through the television screen by the viewer, and the show prompts audiences to search for patterns, stability and answers just as Anna does throughout. After reading the book “The Woman Across the Lake,” Anna witnesses a murder akin to the book’s, reiterating how the show simultaneously emobies and spoofs the genre.
Due to its attempt to play into the list of tales that came before it, the show struggles in moments to effectively balance the thinly sliced line of disturbing and humorous. The immoderate plot details like Anna’s daughter being literally eaten — yes, the delivery of this detail will make you croak out a strained laugh — do make the satirical aspect of the show quite clear, but slightly bogs down the overall intended tone.
As articulated by Chitra Ramaswamy from The Guardian, it can be difficult to categorize the show’s intermixing qualities. It often seems to become the very thing it’s attempting to parody, and critics like Ramaswamy feel this “tonal confusion makes it ludicrous at best and at worst disturbing.”
Even though the show’s deadpan humor ironizes the common troupe, each episode is dripping in suspense. The cascading twists and turns in the journey towards “who done it,” combined with the wildness of the plot and over-the-top explanations, help create an exponentially dramatic season.
Even as a spoof, the anticipatory factor of the show is attention grabbing and its pacing is altogether brilliant, to which the show’s creators — Rachel Ramras, Hugh Davidson and Larry Dorf — are to thank. As a viewer, you’re barely given enough time to exhale the breath you’ve been nervously holding before being hit with yet another unexpected twist of growing strangeness.
Despite its clear attempt to be energetic and worthwhile, the show’s cinematography and suspense is all consuming. It indulges watchers deeper into the dark twist of the narrative, asking the audience to create their own version of the unfolding events just as Anna does. In moments, the suspect seems comically clear, until other curiously unanticipated turns leave you once again skeptical over what’s real and what’s in Anna’s head.
“The Woman in the House” holds a rare quality where calm and happy scenes are arguably more unsettling then the clearly suspenseful parts. Each moment is exaggerated, stretched and satirized. The simplest of actions become suspicious and intensely creepy, while clear moments of joy fall uncomfortably within the uncanny.
Add Bell’s impeccable comedic timing, overall pleasant on-screen performance and piercing curiosity, you’ve got a binge-worthy program. She brings a sincerity to her role as Anna that reads wonderfully comedic without trying, acting as the steadfast glue to which holds the patchwork of drifting and wild plotlines together.
A show that purposefully leans into the egregiousness of the “woman who cried murder” troupe, Netflix’s “The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window” will leave you laughing and gasping at the plot’s never-ending disfigurement. Somehow, it is both unexpected and expected, with each episode asking the audience to reorient themselves within the disorder.
Follow Anna throughout the plot’s spiraling drama and absorb yourself into the satirical narrative suspense the show embodies — dead-pan humor, exaggeration and altogether entertaining. “The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window” contemplates the effect of a popular genre, while offering through deliciously suspenseful writing, the metafictional enjoyment of watching a witness of the absurd.
Clairesse Schweig is an Entertainment Intern for the winter 2022 quarter. They can be reached at cschweig@uci.edu.