The Woman in the House Across the Street From the Girl in the Window mostly didn't work, but its ending mad the entire series worth it

Slate

"The eighth and final episode of The Woman in the House made it worthwhile for this viewer, someone all too familiar with the domestic thriller’s conventions," says Laura Miller. "The series appears to be the work of people who have read dozens of these books and the scripts based on them, looking for candidates for adaptation. Throughout the series, Anna browses through novels whose plots resemble the story she’s trapped inside, each one with a title that obliquely references an actual bestselling book. The people responsible for the show, for better and for worse, know their domestic thrillers inside out. Unfortunately, some of their best jokes will only be noticed (let alone appreciated) by other grizzled veterans. It helps to understand what makes all these Woman/Girl thrillers tick. This particular subgenre launched with Paula Hawkins’ 2015 blockbuster novel, The Girl on the Train, and reached its apotheosis three years later with A.J. Finn’s The Woman in the Window, an extremely calculated exercise in what had by then become a well-established formula. In the classic premise, an isolated middle-class woman—almost always white—who feels that her life has been broken spends too much time voyeurizing people with apparently perfect lives. But one day, as she watches, she witnesses a woman murdered. When she tries to report this crime to various authority figures, ranging from the police to her therapist, no one believes her because she drinks too much, takes mood-stabilizing medication, and has a history of mental instability. Eventually, she even comes to doubt herself, but in the end, after several twists, she is proved right."