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Warning: The article below contains major spoilers for The Woman in the House Across the Street From the Girl in the Window, streaming on Netflix.
Netflix’s The Woman in the House Across the Street From the Girl in the Window blends satirical comedy into a series that pokes fun at women-led psychological thrillers. At the same time, the comedy series has its own bloody murder mystery to solve. Creators and showrunners Rachel Ramras, Hugh Davidson and Larry Dorf (Adult Swim’s Mike Tyson Mysteries) craft a world where Anna (Kristen Bell) plays the fool as much as she plays an amateur sleuth on too much red wine. Anna makes everything around her worse, and the comedy-thriller series delights in poking fun at the numerous cliches that Anna embodies.
Ahead of The Woman in the House‘s series premiere on Netflix, CBR sat with the creative team to dig deeper into the heart and concept behind the television series. Ramras, Davidson and Dorf delighted in telling a tale that doesn’t take itself — or its genre — too seriously and praised Kristen Bell for genuinely delivering and committing to the show’s deadpan comedy.
CBR: The three of you have been creating television together for more than a decade. After writing together for so long, what’s something that came up in this series that you felt you could point to like, “Oh, that’s such a Larry move!”
Larry Dorf: It’s funny, we’ve been asked that before — what does each person bring to the team — and I think it’s an unanswerable question because it always changing. We all come from the Groundlings and we’ve written several shows together. We just get each other. We all have a similar sensibility but I wouldn’t say — we used to joke that Rachel brings the heart and the brains [laughs] —
Rachel Ramras: — Larry brings the life! [laughs]
Dorf: The pieces just fit.
I would love to talk more about the humor too because it’s so specific. It’s very deadpan and satirical but it never feels mean-spirited. When you were writing it, what was your target audience? Who were you writing for?
Hugh Davidson: I think you’re right. We’re not mean-spirited and we don’t like that sort of bitchy or mean humor, but that doesn’t mean we don’t like finding humor in really extreme and awful things. We wrote Mike Tyson’s Mysteries and every one of those episodes had a crazy upsetting ending. It was so crazy that it was funny, theoretically, and then the audience gets that. It feels like you’ve got to have the audience be invested in the story enough that they care to find that funny. And, you know, these books, like yes, Rachel thought it was crazy that all these books seem to have the exact same plot. But she actually loves these books and still loves them. So it is something that you have to have of that element, even though you think there are parts of it that you go, “That is so crazy I’m laughing right now.”
Yeah, I was trying to explain the show to my partner and said, “It’s like Scream, but for like romance literature genre.” The one line that really made me laugh is at the very end where Kristen Bell’s character says, “Oh, I don’t drink wine anymore. I drink vodka.” I bowled over laughing.
Ramras: Yeah, I think you’re very correct. That’s a good comparison.
Kristen Bell is amazing in The Woman in the House, and I think really delivers such a genuine feeling to the show and deadpan humor. Did you always know that Kristen Bell would be the person that you wanted to have in this role?
Ramras: She is definitely perfect casting. It was then just about, “Would she respond to the material?” It is absurd, and it is a little bit risky. I think you’re right; it’s not so overtly comedic. So there has to be trust involved. She was a very trusting, very collaborative person. The reason she’s so good for this role is that she would be the actress cast in the non-comedic version of one of these things. You can totally see that she’s very likable. She’s very vulnerable. She is funny, so she was so in on the joke and she’s able to play it. I don’t think we could have imagined anyone more perfect for the role of Anna.
One of my favorite parts is the show’s use of Anna’s voiceover narrations. It’s laced throughout the series and reminds us this is all absurd. How did you decide on how often to use that tool?
Ramras: Anna takes herself very seriously. These voiceovers are a nod to the kind of books Anna’s reading. It’s like I get to imagine those being written and reading what’s going on in the character’s mind. So it was a way of embracing that overwritten, overwrought narration, and it just played nicely into the show.
I think the most absurd thing in the killer reveal to be little Emma. It’s not some Estonian orphan who’s secretly 30 or something, it’s a child killer. We actually see Kristen Bell fight a child on-screen! I was floored in the best way possible. Were there any moments in filming that fight where you pulled back for specific reasons or was it always more of pushing it to how far this could possibly go and then scale back if needed?
Dorf: Yeah, we always knew we wanted to have a truly surprising ending. We never shied away from that. We have a couple of things like that that happen in this — with that fight at the end, Anna killing little Emma, and also Anna’s daughter getting killed and in a very absurd and hopefully comedic way. We never wanted to shy away from that. We really wanted to push the envelope. So it’s like Hugh said, it’s what we used to do in Mike Tyson’s Mysteries. Make it so, so terrible that it’s funny. We just wanted a brutal savage fight between cute Kristen Bell and little sweet Emma at the end. And we got it.
At the end of The Woman in the House, there’s a Glenn Close cameo! She’s a legend in the chiller genre. How did you pitch this show to her?
Ramras: Well, it was funny when we were writing it. It was always like, “And then someone like Glenn Close says you’re in my seat or whatever to Anna.” I never in a million years thought it would actually be Glenn Close. Netflix somehow got her on board enough to get on the phone with me which was the most nerve-wracking phone call of my life I literally think they offered her a free year of Netflix. But she’s very funny and that was the key because she immediately understood what we were going for in the show.
But it was a lot of me elevator pitch talking. She’s not saying anything and my heart is pounding. Then she said, “I want to wear something fabulous. I want gloves.” She was way on board. We are pinching ourselves to this day that she agreed to do it.
Based on how this series ends, did you imagine it to be an anthology series of sorts where Anna goes on future murder adventures? Or do you feel like it’s more of a closed book now?
Davidson: I think in our wildest dreams, we thought there could be an anthology version of this because there are a lot of ways it could go. We did have that as a thought, but we wanted that big ending on the plane really to function just in the same way that some of the cheesier books do where they have excerpts from the author’s next book, which are chapters of some other terrible mystery. We thought that was so funny. You don’t see that in a movie. They don’t show you the beginning of the next thing.
But we did end up outlining another version of this where that plane lands somewhere. We had to figure it out enough so that we could write that ending. Those pages exist somewhere. But really, for this show, we wanted to just feel like, “Oh my god, she’s off again. She got another one.”
Watch Anna fall deeper into a murder mystery she’s not prepared to solve in Netflix’s The Woman in the House Across the Street From the Girl in the Window, streaming on Netflix.
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