The Woman in the House Across the Street From the Girl in the Window (Netflix)

And the award for the longest title for 2022 goes to...

It's funny, the title. That's the intention, a hybrid of several other movies, usually adapted from popular fiction, highlighting a female lead, discovering something horrible going on, almost by accident, or at least by intelligent design. A thriller mini-series, with laughs? How does that work then?

This is a parody of those things of course, hence the long and daft title. Sometimes during the eight episodes of this first (and not last, I would expect, given the cliff-hanger it ends on) season, it is sometimes hard to tell the difference, save from the nonsensical narration and the ever-changing gravestone where the daughter of our lead (Kristen Bell) is buried.

After losing her daughter to a child-eating mental patient (you read it right) at her husband's place of work, our lead Anna is now single, rattling around her big once family house, consoling herself each day with too much wine and watching her neighbours through her living room window. She's not in a good place, mentally. The pills prescribed by her Doctor Ex-husband means that with the addition of the wine, she can have some very real hallucinations.

So when she sees something awful, but everyone else denies it happened, she checks herself, rightfully unsure if she has all of her paddles firmly in the water.

What follows is a rather by-the-numbers affair which embraces all of the tropes you might find in projects like this. It never goes so far that it becomes farcical, and on occasion is quite edge-of-the-seat compelling. It remains an odd premise and is never really an idea you get comfortable with. Arguably it could be a terrible idea and really, it shouldn't work, but yet it still does, mostly. There are the obligatory twists and turns and it doesn't become clear until the conclusion just what is going on and the truth, if we can call it that, is unexpected as much as it is unbelievable.

A fun mini-series that won't set the world alight or do too much damage to either genre that are touched upon. Bell is watchable as always and doesn't really put a foot wrong in her faux portrayal of a scarred wife and mother who now has neither child or husband. Don't take it too seriously and you'll be fine.