This article has spoilers forThe Girl in the House Across The Street From the Girl In the Window , andThe Woman in a Window .

Netflix's From the Girl in The Window is a parody on domestic suspense, but it's not overtly funny. Hugh Davidson and Rachel Ramras are not the ones behind the miniseries. They have a lot to do with it. Many viewers will wonder if this is a parody of the genre or an example of it.

Is it worth it? It doesn't work. But the eighth and final episode of The Woman in the House was worth it for this viewer who is familiar with the conventions of domestic thrillers. This series seems to have been created by people who have read hundreds of these books, and the scripts that were based on them, in search of suitable adaptations. Anna is seen browsing through books whose plots are similar to the one she's stuck in, with each title that obliquely refers to a bestselling book. For better or worse, the people behind the show know domestic thrillers like the back of their hands. Some of their most memorable jokes won't be appreciated by the rest of us, even though we are seasoned veterans.

It is helpful to understand the motivations behind all these Woman/ Girlsthrillers. This subgenre was launched by Paula Hawkins' blockbuster novel The Girl On the Train in 2015. It reached its peak three years later when A.J. Finn's The Woman in the Window, a meticulous exercise in what was already a well-established formula. The classic story tells of a middle-class, isolated woman who feels her life is broken and spends too much time voyeurizing others with seemingly perfect lives. One day she sees a woman being murdered. She tries to report the crime to several authorities, including her therapist and police. But no one believes her. She drinks too much, takes mood stabilizers, has a history mental instability, and is too drunk to drive. She doubts herself eventually, but after many twists and turns, she is proven right.

This formula is so popular that it's not surprising that there were so many hits. This formula reflects a variety of anxieties that underlie middle-class femininity. These include an obsession with domestic perfection and the hidden ugly truths behind them, as well as a frustration at not being believed when trying expose these secrets. The Woman in the Housecould have done a lot more with the subtext. However, some of its most subtle jokes, such as the gradual revelations that Anna's every disaster was her husband's fault, but no one except Anna blames him, are very sharp. Dopey shtick such as the recurring casserole gag from 1960s comedy can sometimes overshadow them. Satire must be accurate like a laser. No woman living in a home as well-appointed as Anna would ever make a casserole with canned cream of mushroom soup.

The Woman in the House essentially repeats the plot of The Woman in the Window , adding a lot more irrelevant nonsense like Anna's flirtation with Rex (Benjamin Levy Aguilar), the side piece of the murder victim, and her attempts at reviving her painting career. The self-help books with titles such as You Too can Be an Artist are funny. A 90-minute movie would have been more polished and had better jokes. Parodies of bad movie voice-over ("To understand something, sometimes it is necessary to remind yourself that you can't risk any of the things you care about") and canned dialogue ("It's not easy to admit that you're wrong") that are so similar to the real thing they are barely recognisable as jokes.
However, the ending is bizarrely perfect. It takes the evil-teenager twist of The Woman in the Window to the extreme Bad Seed by making the sociopathic killer a 9 year-old girl (Samsara Yett). There's a hilariously long opening fight scene between Anna, the villain and the pint-sized girl, and then there's a final scene onboard, where Anna is reading a thriller called The Women on the Cruise, while the passenger next to her (Glenn Close!) The woman in Cabin 10 is found dead in the lavatory, then disappears completely. This is the storyline of Ruth Ware’s The Woman In Cabin 10 . The best part about Anna's hospital room was the endless stream of visitors, each one apologizing and telling Anna that they were wrong and she was right. She tells one of them that she has been waiting for this moment for so long. This is the money shot in the Woman/ Girls domestic suspense novel. It is where everyone apologizes for making the heroine look like an unstable drunk, even though she is one. Although the setup (flowers and Anna's stupid joke about the Mack truck), is almost identical, it doesn’t really matter how boring the prologue is, so long as you get what your heart desires. It's too bad that it takes so much time to get there.