Long stretches pass by of Anna staring out her window at her new neighbors, enforcing the ominous mood, and making it hard to call the show a comedy, or at least a conventional one. Anna occupies her time staring out her window while slurping her way to the bottom of comically large glasses of red wine.Īll of this could be the framework for a barrage of broad parodies and gags, like the Naked Gun movies or Mel Brooks’ films, but the jokes are doled out sparingly, and often with subtlety (one of my favorite running gags is the handyman, Buell (Cameron Britton), seen in almost every exterior shot installing a mailbox in front of Anna’s house, over the course of several days we later learn in passing that Buell has been working on that mailbox for over two years). Her large house is flawless in its decor, though neither Anna nor anyone else cleans or maintains it. Anna’s neighborhood of Canterbury Hill is an immaculate slice of suburbia, and it’s also utterly bland.
#Across the street series
Within a few minutes the series gives us all the information viewers need to identify this story’s proper genre. The genre has become so inescapable, on screens large and small as well as in bookstores, that a send-up more ambitious than “What’s Wrong with Tanya?” was inevitable, and Netflix did the honors, giving us the eight-episode miniseries The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window, which the description on the streaming service helpfully tells us “clocks in at under four hours.” Kristen Bell plays the main character, embodying several qualities found in the novels of Hawkins and her ilk protagonist Anna Whitaker is an unreliable narrator (she begins her voice-over in a British accent, dropping it after a few sentences), a heavy drinker, and a woman wrestling with a profound trauma that ended her marriage and gave her an overwhelming fear of the rain. They’ve also been lumped together imperfectly as the books with “girl” or “woman” in the title. The set pieces have all come together to form their own subgenre, one without a commonly accepted name, though ‘women’s psychological suspense,’ ‘female psychological thrillers,’ and ‘domestic thrillers’ have all been tried out as handles. What used to be a working formula for Lifetime has now become big bucks for publishing, and many of the elements from the SNL skit-suburban setting, a crime that may or may not have happened, amateur sleuthing, alcoholism-reappeared in Paula Hawkins’ 2015 best-seller The Girl on the Train, followed by several subsequent best-sellers by other authors ( The Wife Between Us, A Simple Favor, Then She Was Gone, and of course The Girl in the Window, just to name a few). Back in 2011, Saturday Night Live spoofed the Lifetime network’s original movies with a game show for suburban moms of troubled teens called “What’s Wrong with Tanya?” When the host comments that “Mary-Jo-Beth Jo-Jo” from Pleasanttown (Anna Faris) has a perfect life, Mary-Jo-Beth wearily raises a glass of wine and murmurs “Perfect… from the outside.”