Netflix’s ‘The Woman Across The Street From The Girl In The Window’ Should Have Just Been A Movie

Yesterday, Netflix rolled out probably the TV show with the longest title I’ll ever have to put in a headline, The Woman Across The Street From The Girl In The Window, or maybe we’ll call it WATSFTGITW for short. Actually that’s not much better.

Regardless, the Kristen Bell project is a parody of movies/books like The Girl on the Train and The Woman in the Window, which starred Emily Blunt and Amy Adams respectively. It’s probably the most direct parody of The Woman in the Window (incidentally, a panned Netflix original film), though with a helping of Blunt’s Train alcoholism, but really, this is an entire genre all to itself, hence the parody.

Does it work? Kind of.

There were a few moments in The Woman Across The Street From The Girl In The Window (sigh) where I did genuinely laugh out loud, like the revelation of how Bell’s daughter died (sorry, trust me, it’s darkly funny). And I did predict the ending correctly which is about as absurdist as you could have hoped for in a project like this.

And yet, like the movies it’s making fun of, this probably…also should have been a movie, not an eight part series of 22-29 minute episodes. That bloats it to 204 minutes in total, more than three hours, and it very much does feel like a three hour and twenty minute film, which is not a compliment. This isn’t The Avengers, and a project like this simply does not need to be this long, and as such, it really drags. It’s easy to see how this could have been a lot tighter at actual Woman in the Window runtime, an hour and forty minutes.

When the jokes land, they hit hard, but often the project goes for very, very long stretches of time keeping a straight face as a drama, which makes the whole tone of this a bit off. This isn’t exactly a Scary Movie-like offering, and yet something doesn’t quite work here about the approach they took. Kristen Bell, however, is perfect in a role like this, and is easily the best part of the production.

The Woman Across The Street From The Girl In The Window debuted at #2 on Netflix just behind Ozark, but I expect most people to either A) bounce off if they don’t get or like the “joke” here or B) burn through it quickly and move on. Neither critics nor audiences seem to be enamored with it, as it has a 54% and 59% on Rotten Tomatoes respectively, but that really never stops Netflix productions from being hits. We’ll see how it does as time goes on.

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