{"id":426358,"date":"2026-04-08T17:09:10","date_gmt":"2026-04-08T17:09:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/426358\/"},"modified":"2026-04-08T17:09:10","modified_gmt":"2026-04-08T17:09:10","slug":"elizabeth-banks-in-peacock-comedy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/426358\/","title":{"rendered":"Elizabeth Banks in Peacock Comedy"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tThe first thing to know about The Miniature Wife, Peacock<\/a>\u2019s new dramedy based on Manuel Gonzales\u2019 short story, is that the title is not metaphorical. Or, rather, that it is in the sense that it centers on a woman who feels diminished in her marriage \u2014 but that those sentiments quickly become literalized when Lindy (Elizabeth Banks<\/a>) is accidentally reduced to a six-inch height by her scientist husband, Les (Matthew Macfadyen<\/a>).<\/p>\n

\n\tThe second thing to know is that despite that head-turningly bizarre concept, The Miniature Wife offers too little payoff to hold on to one\u2019s attention for long. Too sour to choke down when it\u2019s not too treacly to swallow, this ten-episode slog probably could have done with some downsizing itself.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tThe Miniature Wife\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t\t\tThe Bottom Line<\/p>\n

\tA big misfire.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\tAirdate:<\/strong> Thursday, April 9 (Peacock)
Cast:<\/strong> Elizabeth Banks, Matthew Macfadyen, O-T Fagbenle, Sian Clifford, Sofia Rosinsky, Aasif Mandvi, Ronny Chieng, Zoe Lister-Jones
Creators:<\/strong> Jennifer Ames and Steve Turner, based on the short story by Manuel Gonzales\t\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\tThe inciting incident arrives at what was already an inflection point in the Littlejohns\u2019 marriage. Married for 20 years and miserable for the last several, they\u2019ve fallen into an annual tradition of promising they\u2019ll do better in the New Year, only to backslide into their usual bickering at the slightest provocation. As quickly becomes apparent in the Greg Mottola-directed premiere, this holiday season is no exception. When workaholic Les bails on their anniversary plans to hole up in his lab, Lindy, a once-promising novelist whose career has been put on hold in part so Les could pursue his, declares she\u2019s done for good.<\/p>\n

\n\tThen she gets hit with an errant spray of an experimental chemical he\u2019s been working on, and she finds herself more trapped than ever thanks to her new, freakishly tiny size.<\/p>\n

\n\tTo give credit where it\u2019s due: In a sea of largely indistinguishable streaming shows about wealthy white people trapped in unhappy marriages, creators Jennifer Ames and Steve Turner offer a fresh spin on that ballooning subgenre, if nothing else. While it doesn\u2019t feel wholly original \u2014 think The War of the Roses by way of Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, with a liberal sprinkling of Gone Girl references for good measure \u2014 at least it\u2019s not another coastal murder mystery.<\/p>\n

\n\tIts sardonically comedic tone is initially a selling point as well. The world of The Miniature Wife is a heightened one, where offices are lit in sickly shades of green and yellow and staffed by interchangeable red-lab-coated stooges who all seem to be named Bob. Meanwhile, frequent use of a tilt-shift effect for establishing exterior shots reminds us that though Lindy might be confined to a literal dollhouse, she\u2019s not the only one trapped in a waking nightmare. (The CG used to scale Lindy down is less elegant, and less convincing.)<\/p>\n

\n\tThe sense of absurdity is crucial for keeping The Miniature Wife within the realm of sci-fi comedy rather than, say, sickly body horror or harrowing abuse drama. But the extravagance does fewer favors for its characters, who never quite stop feeling like hideously unflattering caricatures of themselves.<\/p>\n

\n\tMacfadyen is perfectly cartoonish as Les, a Nobel-chasing egomaniac who reacts to every minor setback with the stomping feet and whiny vocal inflections of a toddler. But he\u2019s hamstrung by a script that can\u2019t decide if Les is meant to be menacing or buffoonish, worthy of our empathy or only our contempt.<\/p>\n

\n\tPerformance-wise, he at least fares better than Banks, who is forced by Lindy\u2019s soda-can-sized stature to recite most of her lines in a top-volume shout. If Lindy is the clear victim in this scenario, she\u2019s hardly what you\u2019d call a sympathetic one. Both pre- and post-miniaturization, she\u2019s so starved for validation that she\u2019ll plagiarize a student\u2019s work or strike up an emotional affair with a fan (O-T Fagbenle\u2019s Richard) who happens to be a colleague of Les\u2019.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn a generous light, it\u2019s possible to see how The Miniature Wife could have spun its unlikable leads into a uniquely spiky take on the toll of professional ambition, or the way each generation\u2019s worst deficiencies get passed on to the next. (Lindy and Les, themselves the products of deeply flawed families, share a college-aged daughter, Sofia Rosinsky\u2019s Lulu, who\u2019s inherited their tendencies toward selfishness, arrogance and vindictiveness.) Or to envision a more imaginative one that takes the family\u2019s situation into more thrillingly surreal places.<\/p>\n

\n\tBut despite the extravagant sprawl of its 40-ish minute episodes, The Miniature Wife lacks the curiosity to see Lindy\u2019s state as anything more than a slightly exaggerated manifestation of mundane relationship issues, or the boldness to follow their most toxic traits into actually dangerous territory. Even with the padding of frequent flashbacks to Les and Lindy\u2019s happier days \u2014 as well as wheel-spinning subplots involving Lindy\u2019s book agent (Sian Clifford, making the best of it) or Les\u2019 new work colleagues (Ronny Chieng as a man-child investor and Zoe Lister-Jones as his icy but sexually frustrated second-in-command) \u2014 the series feels well out of steam by about the midpoint of its season.<\/p>\n

\n\tEventually, The Miniature Wife tries to convert all this pent-up bile into an unconvincing sweetness \u2014 to try and convince us that Lindy and Les have never actually stopped caring about each other, and that perhaps they might even find their way toward being happy together again. In the show\u2019s calculation, their obsessive torment of each other is proof not of their incompatibility but their rightness for one another. Asked early on why she doesn\u2019t just leave, Lindy explains, \u201cLes know the real me. The worst of me. And he still loves me.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tBut by season\u2019s end \u2014 by episode two\u2019s end, really \u2014 we\u2019ve seen so much of the worst of them, and so little of the best, that it\u2019s hard to see what there is to love about either of these wretched souls. For my money, it\u2019s Lulu and Lindy who best sum up this family\u2019s predicament, during a rare mother-daughter-heart-to-heart. \u201cWe all suck,\u201d says Lulu, with the awe of someone having a life-changing epiphany. \u201cWhich sucks,\u201d agrees her mother. Pulitzer-winning novelist that Lindy is, I suppose it\u2019s appropriate that I couldn\u2019t have said it better myself.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The first thing to know about The Miniature Wife, Peacock\u2019s new dramedy based on Manuel Gonzales\u2019 short story,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":426359,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[263],"tags":[18,25048,117,19,17,67965,327,13705],"class_list":["post-426358","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-eire","tag-elizabeth-banks","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-matthew-macfadyen","tag-movies","tag-peacock"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/116370195406964569","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/426358","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=426358"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/426358\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/426359"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=426358"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=426358"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=426358"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}