The Woman in -- Who can remember a title that long? You get the idea.

I watched this Netflix special with the absurdly long name of "The Woman in the house across the street from the girl in the mirror" starring Kristen Bell and I have to say it was absurd but not exactly funny. I'm no stranger to dark comedy, and it isn't that Kristen Bell can't deliver comedic material. "The Good Place" had me in stitches, but there's something less funny about the untimely death of a 9-year-old girl and a mother so grief stricken she can't go out in the rain. The show is filled with absurdity, and absurdity can be funny if done right. Perhaps it is because I am less filled with schadenfreude (taking joy from the misery of others) that this show did not elicit a single laugh even in the most absurd and potentially comical of times. It seems that the show is trying to parody horror films that get their thrills from mining the human psyche (like rear-window, vertigo, etc) without realizing that the same empathy which makes those classic horror films work would stifle any potential laughter for this piece of work. 

I watched it straight through from start to finish, but never laughed once. The absurdity was enough of a disconnect to confuse me and cause me to realize that the show could not be in earnest, but never made it to the point of making me laugh. There is enough of a psychological connection with the main character to make you binge, but too much for you to laugh at her pain, if that makes sense. Because I haven't really come up with a numerical system for rating movies, I won't try to give this a rating, but I believe it deserves to go somewhere in the middle. It completely failed at being a comedy. It felt rather tone-deaf and all the absurdity in the world can't make you laugh at the woes of a person you feel connected to. One of the selling points of "The Good Place" was that her character was just enough of a bad person that it didn't feel wrong to laugh at her misfortunes. However, I can't exactly give it the lowest of ratings because I did binge it from start to finish. It was more because it felt like a train wreck and I couldn't look away for wanting to know what happened.

I did figure out the twist villain very early on in the series, but there was another suspect I had in mind and they almost got me to believe it was that person for about five minutes before he was taken down. Perhaps horror parodies just aren't my think. I don't doubt that there may be some that could find the absurdity in this piece funny, given the volumes of people who laugh at shows like Family Guy which has always fallen flat for me as well. The difference is that at least Family Guy elicits some laughs (however few and far between) whenever I decide to give it another chance, even though I always decide it is not funny enough to offset the annoying nature of the voice acting.