by Limewater Mon Mar 07, 2022 12:40 am
The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window
The current Wikipedia article calls this "primarily a parody of mystery psychological thrillers," but I don't think that's really a fair assessment and likely contributes to the relatively negative reviews this series received.
Kristen Bell plays a struggling woman who drinks wine all day and takes (legit) prescription medications. This causes her to have hallucinations. She believes that she witnesses a murder in the house across the street, but nobody believes her.
Based upon the title, you would think that this would be a super silly and likely crappy spoof, along the lines of the "____ Movie" movies. You would be wrong, and, as I wrote earlier, I believe that gave people certain expectations that were not met.
The show is not a series of references to prior psychological thrillers pretending to be jokes like the "____ Move" movies. It's also not a series of rapid-fire jokes along the lines of Airplane!.
I think my wife put it pretty well when she said, "It's like they wanted to make a mystery thriller, but knew they couldn't really play it straight." It's more like a mystery thriller that isn't afraid to poke fun at genre conventions and archetypes. There really aren't a ton of jokes, but the jokes that are there are usually pretty good. And they aren't afraid to be really silly. But it actually has a story, and the story isn't just there as an excuse to set up jokes.
That kind of makes the show rather unique, in my opinion. I am not really sure I have seen anything like it before. And I actually really liked it.
Systems: TI-99/4a, Commodore Vic-20, Atari 2600, NES, SMS, GB, Neo Geo MVS (Big Red 4-slot), Genesis, SNES, 3DO, PS1, N64, DC, PS2, GBA, GCN, NDSi, Wii