His & Hers series review: This Alice Feeney adaptation starring Jon Bernthal and Tessa Thompson offers sporadic thrills

After Run Awaymoved the Harlan Coben novel’s US setting to England, His & Hersis set in Dahlonega, Georgia, not in the pretty village of Blackdown in the UK of Alice Feeney’s 2020 novel on which the show is based.

That is not the only change the mini-series makes from the source material. In the book, all the characters are uniformly awful, and there is harm to animals, which thankfully the show eschews. Some new characters have been introduced, and some arcs have been excised. The jury is out on the effect the changes have on the show.

Anna (Tessa Thompson) is a news anchor for WSK TV News who took a leave of absence following a family tragedy. Lexy (Rebecca Rittenhouse) fills in for Anna and then takes over following Anna’s continued absence. When Rachel (Jamie Tisdale) is murdered in Dahlonega, where Anna grew up, she sees it as an opportunity to get back on television. She gets Lexy’s husband, Richard (Pablo Schreiber), with whom she had an affair, to be her cameraperson.

Detective Jack Harper (Jon Bernthal), Anna’s estranged husband, is in charge of the case. Jack lives with his sister, Zoe (Marin Ireland), who is a flighty single mum to a little girl, Meg (Ellie Rose Sawyer).

When Rachel’s friend Helen (Poppy Liu), the headmistress of St Hilary’s Girls School, is also murdered, Anna is forced to look to her past as she went to school with Rachel and Helen. The series switches back in time to Anna’s 16th birthday when something terrible happened.

As students at St Hilary’s, Rachel (Isabelle Kusman) was rich, pretty, popular and cruel, with Helen (Tiffany Ho) and Zoe (Leah Merritt) following her lead, bullying Anna (Kristen Maxwell), whose mum Alice (Crystal Fox) worked as a cleaner, and Catherine (Astrid Rotenberry), who was an outsider because of her size and the fact that her elder sister died — teenagers can be cruel.

Detective Priya Patel (Sunita Mani), Jack’s junior partner, begins to suspect Jack when he tries to tamper with the evidence, while Jack realises to his horror that he is being set up to take the fall. Priya does not buy Jack’s theory that Rachel’s husband, Clyde (Chris Bauer), is guilty.

Blackmail, kinky sex, secrets and lies power His & Hers along to its wholly ludicrous conclusion. Jack is surely the worst detective ever to grace our screens, and his confrontation with Clyde is outright laughable. Priya is the only sensible character in all the overwrought twists and reveals.

His & Hers is genre television at its most commonplace, with six episodes trundling along with attendant eye-rolls, bad fashion (what is with all those terrible pantsuits and hideous earrings?) and snorts of laughter into popcorn or crisp sabudana vadas. Watching His & Hers will not make you rue wasting five hours of your life; on the other hand, giving it a miss would not be that terrible either.

His & Hers is currently streaming on Netflix