The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Win­dow is as con­vo­lut­ed as its title

When the trail­er for Netflix’s The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in The Win­dow dropped almost two months ago, when very lit­tle was known about it, you could have been for­giv­en for mis­tak­ing it for a show full of dark­ly com­ic intrigue.

All the clues point­ed to it being a send up of the no-one-believes-me, sub­ur­ban-mom-turned pill-pop­ping-alco­holic psy­cho­log­i­cal thriller. Four episodes in, how­ev­er, it’s still unclear whether this is actu­al­ly meant to be a par­o­dy of The Woman in the Win­dow, The Girl on the Train and the like. That’s because the show itself doesn’t seem to know what it’s try­ing to be.

In a dif­fer­ent con­text, the main char­ac­ter, Anna (Kris­ten Bell), with her dead-pan sar­casm and over­ac­tive imag­i­na­tion, could actu­al­ly func­tion as a pas­tiche of the time-hon­oured ​“woman on the verge” trope. Iron­i­cal­ly, the show is so con­cerned with try­ing to be some­thing that it ends up being noth­ing; it’s nei­ther clever nor par­tic­u­lar­ly captivating.

Though she’s ulti­mate­ly unable to car­ry the show by her­self, Bell puts in a com­mend­able shift in the lead role, prac­ti­cal­ly mock­ing her­self by slip­ping into a doolal­ly haus­frau ver­sion of Veron­i­ca Mars. Anna’s moments of reflec­tion, nar­rat­ed in a style as con­vo­lut­ed as the title, are one of the most enjoy­able aspects of the show. This is when she tries to con­vince her­self – and the audi­ence – of depth, both emo­tion­al­ly and intellectually:

“To get to the bot­tom of some­thing, some­times you have to remind your­self that if you don’t risk any­thing, you risk every­thing. And the biggest risk you can take is to risk noth­ing. And if you risk noth­ing, what you’re real­ly doing is risk­ing not get­ting to the bot­tom of some­thing. And if you don’t get to the bot­tom of some­thing, you risk everything.”

While these lit­tle gems are meant to make us gig­gle and think back to var­i­ous pop­u­lar twist-end­ing thrillers of recent years, what they real­ly do is act as a ver­bal rep­re­sen­ta­tion of this show’s for­mat: con­fused and stuck in a bor­ing loop it can’t quite get out of.

Even the real com­ic mat­ters of the show – the por­tray­al of her alco­holism through gigan­ti­cal­ly rimmed wine glass­es, the Ground­hog Day-style mail­box sit­u­a­tion, and Anna’s encoun­ters with bitchy neigh­bours – don’t real­ly get a rise enough to laugh out loud.

So by the time we learn that her daugh­ter was mur­dered and eat­en by a can­ni­bal on Take Your Daugh­ter to Work Day, all we can do is meet this absurd sto­ry­line with Bell’s character’s only strength: a pok­er face. Which is a shame giv­en that this writer’s pri­ma­ry motive for watch­ing this show was to see Bell in a dif­fer­ent kind of role. Which it is. But then, is it? The inde­ci­sive­ness of this mud­dled show has a way of rub­bing off on you.