What I’m Watching: The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window (Season Finale)

The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window: Season 1, Episode 8 (D-)

Really? This is supposed to be it? This was absolutely not worth the investment and I’m concerned that the final scene on the plane indicates that this show could return for more inanity in the future. Having the culprit be Emma, who killed her mom because she didn’t want to have a sibling and then her dad because she hated his ventriloquist routine, was dumb, and even though efforts were made to show how she orchestrated all of the fake clues, none of it adds up. I suppose the other thing that could make sense is that everyone would be so dumbfounded by the idea that a child would be attacking them that they wouldn’t think to take it seriously and defend themselves. But it’s not worth using up more energy to try to comprehend it. Everyone coming into the hospital to apologize to her after she repeated the exact same line to each of them felt very forced, and then somehow she ended up being a successful, confident artist who was able to twirl around with delight in the rain and no longer paralyzed by fear. Maybe it had something to do with Douglas, who messed up her prescription and then ended up being father to a new child by the end of the episode. I appreciate dramas and thriller that intrigue and reveal what’s actually going on. This one has been too frustrating and unintelligent to endure, and it didn’t make good use of anyone’s talents, especially Kristen Bell’s.

Season grade: D
Season MVP: None

What I’m Watching: The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window

The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window: Season 1, Episode 7 (C-)

For a show that often restarts from scratch whenever something new is revealed, a lot happened in this episode in terms of discoveries, though it’s hard to know if any of them are actually real. There were a few more indications that this is supposed to be a humorous parody, like how Anna developed a “cottage industry” of putting people’s dogs into masterpieces before she started getting burnt out and Douglas’ absurd sentiment that he didn’t want to tell her that Buell had been found criminally insane after he killed his entire family with a claw hammer because she never would have wanted to hire him. I kept seeing him and thinking he was suspicious, but I didn’t realize until I looked him up that he was played by Cameron Britton, a terrific actor who has portrayed a criminally insane man – on “Mindhunter” – as well as someone falsely accused of criminal activity in “Manhunt: Deadly Games.” It seems obvious that Buell is the killer, but every episode has suggested new suspects before pivoting completely away from them. Whether or not she’s innocent, she has to process her wild imagination that allows her to convert actions like stabbing a painting of someone into memories of actually killing a person. I imagine that Neil did come over with a gun to threaten her to stay away, but who knows at this point? While I understand that this is supposed to be a parody, it’s falling very flat and has only one episode left to redeem itself.

What I’m Watching: The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window

The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window: Season 1, Episode 6 (C-)

Well, things developed quickly here and have now come back to a place that makes this show less interesting in my mind. Anna’s imagination can only take us so far, and if she’s constructed something entirely of her own making with no basis in reality to cover up a murder she actually committed, that doesn’t make the past five episodes feel very worthwhile. She did wake up with just one look needed at her empty wine class to mistakenly tell her that she had hallucinated having sex with Rex, but she walked downstairs to find him naked in an apron making her French omelets. He was even willing to forgive her regrettable sexy talk, but then he had to promptly get arrested for murdering Chastity. These detectives really are terrible, jumping to conclusions and then releasing people once they’ve actually bothered to do the proper investigating. There are also the weird creepy moments like Buell having a nail sticking out of Anna’s hand when he let her into her house, but those probably won’t amount to anything either. Anna was already ready to face the outside world when Sloane came by, and she was in particularly good shape when Neil and Emma came over to her daughter’s grave at the cemetery. Of course that’s when she would suddenly become the prime suspect, a possibility that she’s now starting to convince herself could be just as true as everything she’s imagined so far. That “perfect family” painting to complete the detective’s sentence certainly didn’t help her case.

What I’m Watching: The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window

The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window: Season 1, Episode 5 (C)

I found this episode to be interesting because it changed the narrative in a productive way, one that reshaped everything and suggested that Neil was never a bad guy but instead the victim of someone else’s scheme, about to get very badly hurt by those taking advantage of him. Rex, who initially didn’t get too far by covering Anna’s mouth while he was asking her questions he wanted her to answer, seemed legitimately concerned for Chastity and at the same time upset by the fact that she had cut him out of a deal that had been part of a working arrangement for him. The sequences of the two of them ripping older men off as they wrote checks for her allegedly ill brother were once again imagined, but this time it wasn’t Anna making them up but someone else describing them in great detail. That still felt a lot like a fantasy, as opposed to the harsh reality of her being served a restraining order by the police, who showed up wanting things that forced her to carefully ensure that Rex wasn’t seen. Even if Rex’s story is all true, there’s still a dead body, and Lisa may have used Anna’s reputation to try to frame Neil, a deviation from her typical operating procedure. I was pleased to see Michael Ealy, whose character I presumed was dead but it turns out has just moved on to someone who’s able to function while reserving a soft spot for the ex-wife he clearly does still care about even if they can’t be together. Finally getting to be with someone else in any context will probably be good for her.

What I’m Watching: The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window

The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window: Season 1, Episode 4 (C)

Actress Janina Gavankar has been all over TV recently, currently appearing on season two of “Big Sky” and also recurring on “The Morning Show.” I wasn’t sure how much we’d see of her since she died only moments after being introduced, which of course was just Anna imagining what might have happened. Her instantaneous death upon falling into the water made it clear that it wasn’t actually playing out, though the vivid reconstructions of events make it hard to deny the possibility that they may be true. As usual, Anna jumped at everything she thought was an opportunity, like going to meet Meredith’s sister under the pretense of having met her in pottery class so that she could learn more about her. Hearing that Hillary was not close with Neil sparked her interest, as did her suggestion that he was cheating on Meredith. She was able to investigate the “other tragedy” quite efficiently too, and of course Neil happened to be a chaperone on the field trip where the teacher fell. I did enjoy Marc Evan Jackson’s appearance as the lighthouse operator eager to see himself on television. His appearance and Tim Bagley’s as the school employee only serve to reaffirm that this is meant to be a comedy. I’m glad that she at least followed Neil to see that he was apparently using a ventriloquist dummy as a way to cope with everything, a bizarre twist that at least makes it seem like he may not be a killer. Having her go down that rabbit hole was a great way to distract from a new threat that she hadn’t even really considered, who showed up right behind her just as she got the call that plenty of dirt came up on Rex. I’m very curious to learn what that means.

Take Three: The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window

The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window: Season 1, Episode 3 (C)

It’s not exactly convincing to learn that Lisa isn’t dead but that the only proof for that is that she’s allegedly on a plane and that her red flight attendant scarf might have looked like blood. The dismissal of her very valid and perfectly accidental discovery that the airline she works for doesn’t yet fly to Seattle as her maybe not wanting Neil to know where she was going was highly irresponsible. It does take into account, however, the very concerning behavior she has been exhibiting, like crawling around Neil’s house to find Lisa’s earring and using a badge number that she has on old documents to run a background check on Neil. Sloane telling her to go to a support group was a positive step, and it would have been nice if she had actually gone to that grief retreat in Miami. This show’s peculiar tone took another turn in this episode with the detective uttering the line “until the day he killed and ate your daughter,” which suggests that it’s supposed to be some sort of twisted parody, but I’m not really seeing that since it’s mostly drama and mystery. Anna was only further egged on to look into all of this by the threat she saw on her car, and showing the picture of Rex to Emma clued her into a side of Neil that she hadn’t previously seen. She’s definitely going to latch on to this new theory that he killed his wife, something that police likely should have investigated too.

Round Two: The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window

The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window: Season 1, Episode 2 (C+)

I’m still not sure exactly how to take this show, though we are getting somewhere in terms of what Anna has seen, even if it remains up to us as viewers to determine what was real and what wasn’t. Hearing people gossip about her in the supermarket felt like it was something she actually experienced, and though Carol was in the wrong, she was done enough to tell her that she wasn’t going to pray for her anymore. Her meeting with Lisa, the apparent girlfriend of her attractive new neighbor, didn’t go all that poorly aside from the shock factor that hit Anna, but catching her throwing out the markers she had given Emma demonstrated that many of Anna’s fears about what people think of her are legitimate. The story she told her therapist on the phone about her family was harrowing and very disturbing, but again, it could all be invented, and there’s just no way to know right now. Sloane is her best tether to reality, but she’s more interested in pouring completely full glasses of wine and stalking her neighbors on Instagram than taking her help. Trying painting again didn’t work, and the canvas bore the brunt of her knife range, and putting on lingerie to take a laughing selfie for a fake Instagram account isn’t going to help much either. But her attention is sure to be focused on Lisa being murdered, something that she’ll have a difficult time convincing anyone actually happened but did compel her to run out into the rain, something that’s evidently traumatic and triggering.

Pilot Review: The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window

Check out my one-minute take on every new pilot, which is embedded below and you can also watch by subscribing to movieswithabe on YouTube.