‘The Miniature Wife’ Review: Elizabeth Banks and Matthew Macfadyen Get Trapped in a Hugely Frustrating Peacock Dramedy

The first thing to know about The Miniature Wife, Peacock’s new dramedy based on Manuel Gonzales’ 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 — but that those sentiments quickly become literalized when Lindy (Elizabeth Banks) is accidentally reduced to a six-inch height by her scientist husband, Les (Matthew Macfadyen).

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

The inciting incident arrives at what was already an inflection point in the Littlejohns’ marriage. Married for 20 years and miserable for the last several, they’ve fallen into an annual tradition of promising they’ll 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’s done for good.

Then she gets hit with an errant spray of an experimental chemical he’s been working on, and she finds herself more trapped than ever thanks to her new, freakishly tiny size.

To give credit where it’s 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’t feel wholly original — 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 — at least it’s not another coastal murder mystery.

Its 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’s not the only one trapped in a waking nightmare. (The CG used to scale Lindy down is less elegant, and less convincing.)

The 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.

Macfadyen 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’s hamstrung by a script that can’t decide if Les is meant to be menacing or buffoonish, worthy of our empathy or only our contempt.

Performance-wise, he at least fares better than Banks, who is forced by Lindy’s 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’s hardly what you’d call a sympathetic one. Both pre- and post-miniaturization, she’s so starved for validation that she’ll plagiarize a student’s work or strike up an emotional affair with a fan (O-T Fagbenle’s Richard) who happens to be a colleague of Les’.

In a generous light, it’s 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’s 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’s Lulu, who’s inherited their tendencies toward selfishness, arrogance and vindictiveness.) Or to envision a more imaginative one that takes the family’s situation into more thrillingly surreal places.

But despite the extravagant sprawl of its 40-ish minute episodes, The Miniature Wife lacks the curiosity to see Lindy’s 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’s happier days — as well as wheel-spinning subplots involving Lindy’s book agent (Sian Clifford, making the best of it) or Les’ new work colleagues (Ronny Chieng as a man-child investor and Zoe Lister-Jones as his icy but sexually frustrated second-in-command) — the series feels well out of steam by about the midpoint of its season.

Eventually, The Miniature Wife tries to convert all this pent-up bile into an unconvincing sweetness — 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’s 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’t just leave, Lindy explains, “Les know the real me. The worst of me. And he still loves me.”

But by season’s end — by episode two’s end, really — we’ve seen so much of the worst of them, and so little of the best, that it’s hard to see what there is to love about either of these wretched souls. For my money, it’s Lulu and Lindy who best sum up this family’s predicament, during a rare mother-daughter-heart-to-heart. “We all suck,” says Lulu, with the awe of someone having a life-changing epiphany. “Which sucks,” agrees her mother. Pulitzer-winning novelist that Lindy is, I suppose it’s appropriate that I couldn’t have said it better myself.