The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window (2022) quietly dropped all eight of its episodes on Netflix this Friday, and by Saturday morning I’d binged the whole thing. It’s a show that makes for perfect background noise—I folded laundry, vacuumed, changed my cat’s litter, and did a light workout—but it’s not going to hold the interest of those few brave streamers who don’t text or scroll Twitter while watching vaguely entertaining garbage. 

I wanted to like this miniseries, starring the ever-likable Kristen Bell as a woman living out the story of a hacky thriller novel, but The Woman in the House never gives viewers any sense of whether they’re meant to enjoy it in earnest, laugh at its occasional sight gags, or get invested in its mystery. 

The title, which I’m not going to type out again because it’s just too long, feels like an allusion to the Wayans brothers parody micro genre that dominated the late 90s and 00s, such as Don’t Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood. Like the Wayans brothers’ most successful film, Scary Movie, The Woman in the House borrows most of its plot from existing genre entries, mostly The Woman in the Window and The Girl on the Train. 

In theory, it’s a great choice of genre to send up, since the era of the domestic thriller has begun to wane following a slew of uninspired, derivative Gone Girl-lites and Big Little Lies-adjacent also-rans. 

The problem is that The Woman in the House has virtually nothing to say. Its principal murder mystery is never engaging, its heroine (Kristen Bell) is a traumatized alcoholic agoraphobe (sorta, in this version she’s specifically afraid of the rain) who doesn’t play the role nearly as believably as forebears like Amy Adams or Emily Blunt, and the jokes (because, again, this is a parody, apparently) are few and far between. 

The Woman in the House is an eight-episode comedy miniseries with less than five real jokes per episode. The main sight gag is that Kristen Bell fills her wine glasses up to the very brim—very funny the first time around, less so each instance after. There’s an extended, awkward finger-printing scene. The way the protagonist’s daughter dies is so ridiculously absurd that it could potentially be hilarious in a goofier, David Zucker-style spoof; unfortunately, the frequent tonal shifts leave this reveal shockingly macabre at best, tasteless at worst. 

Would I recommend The Woman in the House to anyone? I don’t know, maybe if you have a lot of laundry to fold or surfaces to vacuum and you can’t listen to music because your headphones are charging. Otherwise, A Simple Favor is a much better genre parody, as is Gone Girl, which ironically works as a satire on thrillers and our national obsession with true crime, despite singlehandedly inspiring a slate of uninspired rip-offs. 

Seriously, the thriller genre as we know it today (as we’re never going back to ‘90s mid-budget thrillers like Single White Female or Basic Instinct since Hollywood has an aversion now to premises that don’t involve an unreliable narrator with trauma who may have seen something she shouldn’t) peaked with Gillian Flynn. Gone Girl and the Sharp Objects miniseries are both practically perfect, as is her 2018 film Widows. Her other adaptation, Dark Places, was pretty terrible, but infinitely more original than The Woman in the House. 

Watch any of those instead, or David Fincher’s Panic Room, or Wes Craven’s Red Eye. Just don’t bother with a spoof that only sporadically remembers it’s supposed to be funny.