‘The Woman in the House Across the Street From the Girl in the Window’ Review: A Mocking Mouthful

So is the fact that Netflix is mocking its own product, while offering reviewers the opportunity to provide spoilers on two shows at the same time.

Few will read “The Woman in the House Across the Street From the Girl in the Window” and assume that the contents should be taken entirely seriously. Which is too bad, in a way: Going in cold would probably render a viewer delightfully flummoxed. Nevertheless, the series will present two very different experiences to two different viewerships: the one that has seen “The Woman in the Window” and will recognize every plot point being mocked; and the one that hasn’t and will be consistently bewildered, but eventually tickled, by a dryly funny series that drives a carload of female-centric-thriller conceits over a cliff.

The hitch: The latter group will be looking for a payoff. But the payoff is the lampooning of the earlier show.

Ms. Bell is Anna (as was Ms. Adams), an artist who stopped painting after the death of her young daughter, Elizabeth (Appy Pratt), and the subsequent departure of her husband, Douglas (

Michael Ealy

). Anna’s imaginary conversations, hallucinations and dreams create an atmosphere of altered reality, all of which would be very easy to accept as genre convention if aspects of Anna’s at-home existence didn’t emerge as quasi-comic. She drinks goldfish-bowl-size glasses of red wine, all day, yet never gets drunk; her handyman, Buell (

Cameron Britton

), has been working on the same mailbox for years; Anna has an unending supply of vintage Corning Ware casserole dishes, which she keeps breaking because she either forgets to wear oven mitts or takes them outside in the rain and drops them—she suffers from ombrophobia, a fear of rain.

It was raining, we learn, the day her daughter died, under circumstances too horrible for anything but an absurdist comedy: On Take Your Daughter to Work Day, Elizabeth accompanied her father—a forensic psychiatrist for the FBI who specializes in serial killers—to visit a prison inmate nicknamed Massacre Mike. Dad left the room for a moment; the rest is history, if not quite hysteria. At this point, the audience will likely divide along the lines of what qualifies as dark comedy, and what qualifies as demented. But if you accept early on that “The Woman in the House Across the Street From the Girl in the Window” is trying to go over the top, you’ll likely go along.

The cast is uniformly good, and smart, Ms. Bell especially: She plays Anna dizzily deadpan, as if she were portraying the heroine in a story by

Gillian Flynn

or

Paula Hawkins.

(This one was created by

Hugh Davidson,

Larry Dorf

and

Rachel Ramras

;

Michael Lehmann

is the director.) She doesn’t notice, or care about, the nutty goings-on, or that she may be falling apart. Her friends do—

Mary Holland

is her usual terrific self as Sloane, Anna’s art dealer, who tries to get her back on the painting track and off the pharmaceuticals and Merlot;

Brenda Koo

is the caustic neighbor, Carol, who always seems to be there just when Anna takes a misstep—showing up at her daughter’s old school in pajamas and robe, for instance. It’s not till the good-looking widower Neil (

Tom Riley

) moves in across the street with his daughter, Emma (the charming

Samsara Leela

Yett), that Anna perks up. But everyone thinks she’s simply lost her mind after she claims to have seen Neil’s girlfriend, Lisa (

Shelley Hennig

), murdered, while she was peering into Neil’s living-room window.

Why was she peering into Neil’s living-room window? That’s what lonely, traumatized, hard-drinking, pill-popping, therapist-deceiving, Corning Ware-destroying women do in this kind of thing. “The Woman in the House Across the Street From the Girl in the Window” just finds the fun in popping genre balloons.