Elizabeth Banks and Matthew Macfadyen’s sci-fi show The Miniature Wife underlines

Miniature people were a staple of science fiction and fantasy until the time of Jonathan Swift. Gulliver’s Travelsand shriveled characters have captured the spotlight in everything from classic Hollywood films such as Bride of Frankenstein and Fantastic cruise to family blockbusters such as Ant-Man and Honey, I shrunk the kids. References to these and other films appear throughout the new Peacock limited series Miniature wifebut a stretched-out 10-episode show isn’t a particularly worthwhile addition to the shrinking sci-fi canon.

Taking only the title and basic premise from Manuel Gonzales’ 2014 short story, Miniature wife stars Elizabeth Banks as Lindy Littlejohn, a once-prominent author who now works as a university professor and has been overshadowed by her scientist husband Les (Matthew Macfadyen). Lindy, as you can see, feels metaphorically small in both her personal and professional life, and after an accident, she soon becomes literally small—or. is it? – with Les’ potentially world-changing invention, a compound that shrinks objects to about 1/12 their original size.

The most pressing problem for Lindy is that Les has yet to develop a stable antidote to his formula, and everything he’s tried to return to his original size so far has exploded almost immediately. As a bloated modern prestige streaming series, Lindy has other, less interesting problems, including a convoluted plagiarism scandal involving a short story by one of her students that was inadvertently published under her name in The New Yorker. She is also having an “emotional affair” with Les’s colleague Richard (OT Fagbenle), whose interest in her is far more ardent than hers in him.

Meanwhile, Les has signed a contract with an apparently evil oligarch (Ronny Chieng, recycling his nasty tech bro persona from M3GAN) and has only 30 days to create an antidote before losing the rights to all of his works. Miniature wife he devotes a lot of time to tedious office politics at Les’s company, where the demanding but stuffy scientist Vivienne (Zoe Lister-Jones) has been appointed as his new boss. There are also substantial subplots for the Littlejohns’ university student daughter Lulu (Sofia Rosinsky) and Lindy’s hairdresser and best friend Terry (Sian Clifford), which serve as filler for a meandering, unfocused series.

Creators Jennifer Ames and Steve Turner should have started by shortening their show’s episodes, which are about 45 minutes each and split awkwardly between comedy and drama. Miniature wife it features Lindy’s trademark shriveled-human antics as she settles into a dollhouse and must battle insects and pets, along with tiresome relationship drama between Lindy and Les as their already shaky marriage crumbles under the strain of extraordinary circumstances.

“We’re all shit,” Lulu says of the Littlejohn family in the season-ending episode, and she’s absolutely right. Lindy and Les are insufferable as individuals and clearly bring out the worst in each other. This could be tolerated if Miniature wife were a full-blown black comedy, and there’s a point around the middle of the season when the battle between the husbands approaches the nastiness of something like The War of the Roses. However, Lindy’s opening statement that “This is a love story” seems meant to be simplistic, and the attempt to paint the Littlejohns as a couple worth rooting for grows increasingly strained and unconvincing as the series progresses. Banks and Macfadyen have no chemistry, either as lovers or as adversaries, and Macfadyen too often mistakes mugging for emotion.

Like science fiction, Miniature wife is mind-boggling, full of complicated-sounding but ultimately meaningless mathematical jargon and far-fetched leaps of logic, with special effects that often don’t even match the visuals in Lily Tomlin’s 1981 comedy The Incredible Shrinking Womananother obvious influence. “I created a little monster,” Les laments, but gives himself too much credit. All it really did was create a minor irritation.

topics:

• Science fiction/
• TV