This New Year, we’ve already had several crime thrillers with which to while away the cold, grey days until spring.
We’ve had the Harlan Coben adaptation Run Away. We’ve got Paramount+ show Girl Taken, And now we have His & Hers: a new Netflix show starring Tessa Thompson, which, by all accounts, the internet is going barmy for.
An adaptation of the 2020 book by Alice Feeney, His & Hers tells the story of (among others) Anna (Thompson) a former TV news anchor who wants to get her old job back – but who was axed while she was away, mourning the death of her baby girl.
Then there’s a murder, which Jon Bernthal’s detective, Jack Harper, sets about investigating. Anna smells a story, and the chance to have a steamy affair with her replacement’s husband Richard (Pablo Schreiber). The catch? The dead body is Rachel Hopkins, the resident mean girl in their small town of Dahlonega, Georgia. Oh, and she and Jack are still married. Though estranged.
Suspects soon multiply, as do the plot twists. But how does it all end? Here’s how it goes down.
The midway point
By the show’s halfway point, it seems as though the story has been wrapped up. Two more women have been killed: Helen (Poppy Liu) and Zoe (Marin Ireland), who also happens to be Jack’s sister.
At the end of episode five, Richard takes Anna to the house of his wife – Anna’s replacement, TV anchor Lexy Jones (Rebecca Rittenhouse). Anna looks at photos of Lexy and realises that Lexy has been hiding her true identity: she’s actually Catherine Kelly.
Catherine was one of the unpopular girls at high school, who has apparently grown up and started killing the people who used to bully her – starting with Rachel Hopkins.
In episode six, Anna and Lexy fight. Lexy tries to shoot Anna, but Jack’s partner Priya (Sunita Mani), gets there first, and fatally shoots her. Despite Richard protesting that his wife was innocent, she is framed as the killer.
Case closed? Not quite. One year later, Anna gets a letter from her mother, Alice (Crystal Fox). It turns out that Alice was actually the real killer all along, and in the letter she confesses to everything.
The real killer
First, she killed Rachel, after discovering that she was sleeping with (Anna’s estranged husband) Jack. Then she killed Anna’s former friends, and framed Lexy/ Catherine by planting evidence in her home.
Nobody suspected her, because – as she says – nobody suspects old women to be capable of violence. In fact, nobody notices old women much at all, especially if they are (as Alice is) pretending to have dementia.
Her reasons date back to when Anna was a teenager, and was sexually assaulted on her birthday. At the time, queen bee Rachel, along with Anna’s supposed friends Helen and Zoe, arranged the attack, while Lexy ran away before it happened, leaving Anna vulnerable.
Alice found out what happened after watching videos Anna made as a teen – which included footage of her own assault. She then vowed revenge against the girls who made it happen, which, to her, meant murder.
She made sure to be seen walking around naked in public and puts eggshells in her breakfast to fool everybody around her. And she did, right up until the point that Anna reads her letter.
How do things end?
The show actually ends in quite a rosy place. Jack and Anna have reconciled, and are raising Zoe’s orphaned daughter Meg. They move into a new house in Atlanta, Anna is pregnant and back at her old job, and Jack is back at the Atlanta police department.
At the end of the show, the pair have vowed that there will be no more secrets between them, but that might be difficult. After all, Alice killed Jack’s sister, and now Anna knows the truth of what happened too. The two exchange a meaningful glance as the show ends, but... what happens next is anyone’s guess.
“It’s triumphant in some crazy, messed-up way. It’s also harrowing and twisted,” Thompson told Netflix site Tudum. “It’s grounded in this mother’s profound love for her daughter.”
His & Hers is streaming now on Netflix
