Review: ‘His & Hers’ Streaming on Netflix

‘They’ try to solve a murder mystery in Georgia.

As of this writing, the six-episode fictional series His & Hers starring Tessa Thompson and Jon Bernthal is currently number one in the TV show category on the Netflix streaming platform.

According to the Netflix tagline, “this ‘addictive’ thriller about estranged spouses investigating a murder is ‘bound to keep you truly guessing until the very, very end,’ says Collider.”

It currently has a positive 7.2 out of 10 user rating on IMDB, with nearly 400 reviews so far, where the tagline is “a journalist investigating a murder in her hometown clashes with a suspicious detective. There are two sides to every story, and someone is lying.”

If you’re a Netflix subscriber but haven’t seen it yet, these taglines give you a general idea of what the series is about.

His & Hers currently has a 60 percent audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

Some minor spoilers follow. Also, His & Hers is not family friendly entertainment. It contains several explicit scenes and, as standard with Netflix content, just about everyone in the series drops F-bombs all over the place.

While most of the IMDB cohort may disagree, several things become evident — even starting within the first 10 or 15 minutes:

His & Hers is implausible, inauthentic, contains plot holes, and is saddled with various clichés such as the trite conflict between the world-weary cop and the rookie partner.

Admittedly, a reveal at the conclusion of episode one makes you think, “wow, this is going to be interesting.”

For a so-called thriller, it actually doesn’t provide much in the way of thrills, though, with the remaining five episodes meandering along until the customary twist ending.

You might find yourself scrolling through your phone or tablet with the show in the background as you perhaps patiently wait for the conclusion to land.

And with regard to the twist, if you ruminate on the possible suspects, you can probably guess the culprit in advance.

What is somewhat disturbing is the nihilistic smirk that occurs in a closeup in the final scene, but viewers can draw their own conclusions about the implications.

Leaving all that aside, one of the primary issues with His & Hers is that — with the exceptions of the somewhat gullible television station news director and the child actress who portrays Harper’s young niece — none of the characters are likeable.

Netflix presents a caricature of what life in the south (or, as in The Hunting Wives, the southwest) is supposedly like. Those who actually reside in the real-life town of Dahlonega, Ga., may have a legitimate basis to feel put off by the unbelievable storyline.

Bernthal brings back his Walking Dead fake southern accent in portraying Detective (or Investigator – whoever proofread the script perhaps couldn’t decide on the character’s proper job title) Jack Harper, a lawman in the northern Georgia community.

The ‘clueless’ Harper character, supposedly an experienced sleuth in the sheriff’s office, spends most of the series thwarting the murder investigation to which he is assigned, and not in a subtle way, punctuated by cringe, irrational outbursts.

You have to wonder why an accomplished actor like Bernthal would accept such a demeaning role, but perhaps a gig is a gig.

This may be too picky, but no LEO uses his or her personal vehicle (especially this particular one, for reasons that are made obvious during the series) while on duty.

Thompson’s character, Anna Andrews, is Harper’s aforementioned estranged wife. The Andrews character is a condescending, self-absorbed careerist trying to regain her job as an Atlanta television news anchor with the murder reportage as the means. It’s the typical girlboss archetype that is ever-present in Netflix content.

The duo appear to have little, if any, on-screen chemistry.

And despite the mobile U.S. population, His & Hers would also have you accept that individuals, apart from the Andrews character, have no agency or options, and just helplessly stay in the same town that they grew up in even if they don’t want to.

His & Hers would also have you anachronistically believe that local TV is still a thing in 2026 (apart from coverage of a weather emergency such as the one expected this weekend) or that reading off a teleprompter is some kind of prestige position that would lead to an extreme form of jealousy.

The plot also includes a mention of the Andrews character potentially getting an offer from the NBC Today show as a form of validation, even as contemporary network TV viewership is essentially collapsing into irrelevancy, too.

As alluded to above, Sunita Mani awkwardly (and maybe that was on purpose) portrays new detective Priya Patel, Harper’s subordinate, who seems relatively competent and level-headed as she pursues the murder investigation by the book despite Harper’s erratic meddling.

At crunch time, however, she arguably frustrates the investigation.

Harper repeatedly and inauthentically refers to Detective (or Investigator) Patel by the nickname “Boston,” which seems to be a crass way to telegraph to the audience that the latter is much more “sophisticated” than the locals, given the character’s apparent hometown.

In a quote attributed to illustrious author and journalist Tom Wolfe that may apply, he said “The problem with fiction, it has to be plausible. That’s not true with non-fiction.”

During His & Hers, for example, once various conflicts of interest became evident, Harper’s law enforcement superiors would have immediately removed him from the case in any kind of credible or realistic scenario.

Also, the way things turned out in the final episode, both detectives could have been promptly suspended and then fired, if not prosecuted, for the way they mishandled the entire probe.

Ironically, the ‘evil businessman’ character played by Chris Bauer is the only person in the entire yarn that seems to catch on that the murder investigation, such as it is, has completely gone off the rails because of the incompetent or comprised police work.

The Netflix version of His & Hers is based on an apparently well-received book set in the U.K. and authored by a British novelist; it would hardly be the first time that a filmmaker truncated and/or distorted the source material.

In the end, the real mystery in His & Hers on Netflix seems to be how it presumably got green-lit for production in its current form without a comprehensive vetting of the narrative.