Spoiler alert: This review discusses key plot points and the final reveal.
This review reflects a personal opinion, not a factual judgment of the series.
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His & Hers: When Trauma Becomes Aesthetic, and Power Games Pass as Intimacy
At first glance, His & Hers presents itself as a stylish psychological crime drama. The deeper I went, the more uneasy I became with what the series quietly normalizes beneath the surface.
Right from the opening episode, there is a disturbing scene of raising a child through narcissistic pressure, “who’s the best?”. It is framed almost casually. This moment sets the tone. Power, control, and emotional asymmetry are not questioned. They are aestheticized.
The male lead is portrayed as a cynical and emotionally withdrawn detective. He is intelligent, strategic, and seemingly empathetic, yet fundamentally unavailable. From time to time, his intellectual superiority is subtly emphasized, reinforcing a hierarchy that is never openly addressed.
The female lead is introduced as an opportunistic, powerful, attractive woman. Her strength, however, is quickly undermined by the insertion of a vaguely defined trauma. Her vulnerability is not explored. It is symbolically used.
What troubled me most is how rapidly her trauma is injected into the story, without context, depth, or humanity. It remains intentionally foggy, as if trauma itself were a narrative shortcut rather than a lived inner reality. Later revelations suggest that this trauma motivates the entire plot, yet it is never truly held, processed, or integrated by the character herself. Instead, it becomes something others act upon.
The series leans heavily on personas without responsibility. The woman is cast as a fantasy figure: powerful, desirable, unreachable. Unless wounded. Her trauma functions as the key that makes her accessible, relatable, and “saveable.” Without it, she would be too whole, too threatening. This is not character depth. It is symbolic convenience.
The dynamic between the two leads subtly reinforces the idea that emotional regulation happens through the relationship rather than within the self. Withdrawal, silence, cynicism, and emotional ambiguity are portrayed as normal relational currencies. There is a constant, quiet power play, never named and never challenged, as if asymmetry and emotional withholding were simply how intimacy works.
The final twist, revealing that the ultimate violence comes from a maternal figure seeking revenge for the woman’s past trauma, deepens my discomfort rather than resolving it. Trauma is not met with understanding or transformation. It is met with revenge. Pain does not become conscious. It becomes justified violence. The series seems to suggest that unseen suffering finds closure not through integration, truth, or agency, but through destruction carried out by someone else.
This is where the show lost me completely.
Trauma is romanticized. Emotional dysregulation is normalized as intimacy. Power games are treated as everyday relational texture. Revenge is offered as a form of resolution. The woman’s inner life remains largely invisible, her humanity secondary to the plot.
What could have been a nuanced psychological exploration instead reinforces a troubling message. Wounds make people lovable. Connection is built on imbalance. Unresolved pain is answered with retaliation rather than consciousness.
Stylish? Yes. Intense? Certainly. But psychologically shallow in the places where depth mattered most, and quietly dangerous in what it chooses to normalize.
The murder investigation itself, on the other hand, is handled with a certain care. It unfolds gradually, with enough restraint to keep the tension alive without relying on cheap shocks. As a crime narrative, it works. The pacing is steady, the atmosphere controlled, and the structure holds together in a way that keeps you watching.
Don’t get me wrong, the overall quality of the series is still quite solid. The acting is strong, convincing, and nuanced. There is a quiet intensity to many scenes that makes it easy to slip into a late-night viewing mode, the kind where you tell yourself you’ll watch just one more episode. In that sense, it is undeniably engaging.
I do find it semi-entertaining in that familiar way, being caught in a moody TV drama after dark. The ideas the series explores are interesting, even provocative. Yet at the same time, something about the way these ideas are framed leaves me uneasy. It doesn’t disturb me through explicit content, but through implication. Through what is left unquestioned. Through what is slowly normalized.
And maybe that discomfort is intentional. Maybe the series wants to sit in that grey zone, where fascination and unease coexist. If so, it succeeds. The question is whether that tension invites reflection, or quietly asks the viewer to accept dynamics that deserve more scrutiny.
HIS & HERS | Official Trailer | Netflix
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