His & Hers Review

The hook is structural: two unreliable narrators married to each other, each convinced the other killed a woman in their home town, and the novel sells it with short alternating chapters. Six hours of television is a different proposition, and the adaptation spends a lot of them circling. Critics came out around two thirds positive, with a distinctly cooler figure from the aggregator that weights the write ups rather than counting them, and the split is easy to explain.

Tessa Thompson and Jon Bernthal are excellent, she playing withdrawal and contempt at the same time, he giving a detective the exhaustion the plot keeps forgetting to write for him, and William Oldroyd shoots the Georgia locations for genuine unease. Then the last two episodes have to explain everything, and what comes out is a pile of reveals that make the preceding hours look arbitrary rather than withheld.

The dialogue leans hard on people announcing their own subtext. It took the limited series prize at the Black Reel awards and a lead performance prize for Thompson, which is the right read on it: a performance piece attached to a mystery that does not deserve the performances.