Peacock’s new sci-fi series The Miniature Wife is an arch-feminist revision of Honey, I Shrunk the Kids (1989), with exactly that film’s gravitas and moral sophistication. But wait! Is it possible that this derivative goofball dramedy is actually fun?
Through its charmless first episode, the answer is a hard “no.” The series stars Matthew Macfadyen as Les Littlejohn, a mad scientist attempting to master “cellular reduction.” Les’s premise is that staple crops can be shrunk to the size of pinholes, sown on tiny plots, and reinflated to feed the world. Alas, before he can make his fortune, Les inadvertently shrinks his wife, Lindy, a Pulitzer-winning novelist played by Elizabeth Banks. Previously the brash author of My Rainbow Starts with Black (I’ll pass), Lindy is now, in her own telling formulation, the size of “a dry martini.”
The couple spends much of the show’s pilot betraying one another. Annoyed by her husband’s secretiveness, a not-yet-diminutive Lindy attempts to derail his deal with Hilton Smith (Ronny Chieng), a billionaire on the cusp of investing. Les, at once angry and resentful, moves between sulking and screaming for his own “moment in the spotlight.” One wonders, watching the production’s early going, whether the leads were still feeling out their roles as filming commenced. Shrewish and often soused, Banks’s character is about as likable as an infected tooth, a nightmare companion who would send even a sainted husband fleeing to the office. Macfadyen, meanwhile, spends the first episode channeling his deranged performance as Tom Wambsgans on HBO’s Succession, minus the A-plus writing. To say that returns are diminishing is seriously to understate the point.
Under different circumstances, I might have switched off The Miniature Wife after its grating debut. That, I now think, would have been a mistake. While never quite perfect, Peacock’s show improves mightily as it goes, settling into a broadly parodic style reminiscent of NBC’s The Good Place (One can easily imagine Ted Danson in the starring role). To be sure, the silliness remains — ant-sized humans are never going to climb the heights of realism — but the series sheds its stridency to become something playful, amusing, and heartfelt.
In large part, this evolution is the result of wise choices by creators Jennifer Ames and Steve Turner, who collaborated previously on such shows as Goliath and Boardwalk Empire. Beginning in the second episode, viewers see flashbacks to happier times in Les and Lindy’s marriage, a strategy that both humanizes the pair and raises the stakes of their present ill will. Given something other than animosity to play, Banks and Macfadyen remind audiences why they have worked steadily for nearly 30 years. Most importantly, Lindy’s reduced condition introduces an element of whimsy that is sorely lacking in the show’s first hour. There is a reason “downsized” protagonists have been showing up regularly on screens ever since Cecil Hepworth’s 1903 adaptation of Alice in Wonderland.
The Miniature Wife serves up the genre’s usual visual gags: Lindy eating a full-sized candy bar or wearing a seatbelt 20 times too big. Yet the show provides less familiar delights, as well. Among its cleverest exchanges are those between our heroine and “Space Colonel,” a battered toy with which Lindy shares a telepathic bond. Necessarily reliant on trick photography, the series makes much of Les’s and Lindy’s incompatible statures, wringing comedy from, say, Macfadyen’s character’s comparatively gigantic limbs. But relations between the pair are also undeniably tender. Having turned his wife into Jiminy Cricket, Les discovers previously unknown wellsprings of protectiveness and love.
It will surprise no one to learn that Ames and Turner do not entirely approve of the post-shrinkage marriage they have created. Narrating the show’s prologue, a tiny Lindy gripes that her husband “made [her] small,” a reference to her “autonomy” and “dignity” as much as her height. Throughout the series, the dollhouse to which Lindy retreats functions as a well-appointed prison. Readers of American literature will be looking for yellow wallpaper. Like most lazily aggrieved feminists, Ames and Turner have their blind spots. As the series opens, Les thanks Lindy “for inviting me back into our bed.” So much for equality. Yet the bigger problem is that the program’s ideology is unanchored to the reality we observe onscreen. Six inches tall and fragile, Lindy actually does need Les’s protection. As for the dollhouse — well, if I’m ever shrunk, I’d be happy to live in one.
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That these gestures fail to sink Peacock’s latest is a sign of their insincerity as much as anything. The show’s writers have learned their politics by rote and can, having checked off the relevant boxes, proceed to more interesting things. Among the series’s wittiest subplots is a literary gag featuring plagiarism, Lindy’s agent (a very good Sian Clifford), and a profanely fictionalized version of New Yorker editor Deborah Treisman (alas, not played by Treisman herself). The joke works because Lindy is quite clearly not the big deal she thinks she is, never mind the million copies sold and the book-world acclaim. She is, in other words, human. Allowing our heroine to be humbled may be the smartest decision The Miniature Wife makes.
Not all of the show’s elements land as cleanly. The Handmaid’s Tale’s O-T Fagbenle is woefully miscast as Les’s employee Richard, a fellow tinkerer with whom Lindy conducts an emotional affair. A plotline concerning Hilton’s chief scientist (Zoe Lister-Jones) is conceived mostly to remind us that the “reversal” process doesn’t yet work. At 10 episodes, the series is as bloated as any program in recent memory. Producer, shrink thyself. When it succeeds, however, The Miniature Wife is funny, engaging, and sweetly sincere. In an increasingly cynical television landscape, that’s no small thing.
Graham Hillard is the TV critic for the Washington Examiner magazine and editor at the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal.