Elizabeth Banks and Matthew Macfadyen’s sci-fi present The Miniature Spouse underwhelms

Miniature folks have been a staple of science fiction and fantasy going all the best way again to Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, and shrunken characters have taken the highlight in every thing from traditional Hollywood motion pictures like Bride of Frankenstein and Implausible Voyage to family-friendly blockbusters like Ant-Man and Honey, I Shrunk the Children. References to those motion pictures and others are strewn all through the brand new Peacock restricted sequence The Miniature Spouse, however the drawn-out, 10-episode present isn’t a very worthwhile addition to the sci-fi shrinking canon.

Taking solely the title and fundamental premise from Manuel Gonzales’s 2014 brief story, The Miniature Spouse stars Elizabeth Banks as Lindy Littlejohn, a once-prominent creator who now works as a college professor and has been overshadowed by her scientist husband Les (Matthew Macfadyen). Lindy, you see, feels metaphorically small in each her private {and professional} lives, and is about to change into actually small following an accident – or is it? – with Les’s doubtlessly world-changing invention, a compound that shrinks objects to roughly 1/twelfth their unique dimension.

Essentially the most urgent downside for Lindy is that Les has but to develop a steady antidote to his system, and every thing that he has tried to return to its unique dimension to this point has virtually instantly exploded. Since it is a bloated trendy status streaming sequence, although, Lindy has different, much less fascinating issues, together with a convoluted plagiarism scandal involving a brief story by one in all her college students that was inadvertently printed underneath her identify in The New Yorker. She has additionally been having an “emotional affair” with Les’s colleague Richard (O-T Fagbenle), whose curiosity in her is way extra ardent than hers in him.

In the meantime, Les has signed a cope with an clearly evil oligarch (Ronny Chieng, recycling his obnoxious tech bro persona from M3GAN) and has solely 30 days to supply the antidote earlier than shedding the rights to all of his work. The Miniature Spouse devotes numerous time to tiresome workplace politics at Les’s firm, the place the demanding however sultry scientist Vivienne (Zoe Lister-Jones) has been appointed as his new boss. There are additionally substantial subplots for the Littlejohns’ university-student daughter Lulu (Sofia Rosinsky) and Lindy’s editor and greatest buddy Terry (Sian Clifford), which function nothing however padding for a meandering, unfocused sequence.

Creators Jennifer Ames and Steve Turner ought to have began by shrinking their present’s episodes, that are about 45 minutes every and awkwardly break up the distinction between comedy and drama. The Miniature Spouse options some typical shrunken-person antics for Lindy as she takes up residence in a doll’s home and has to struggle off bugs and family pets, together with tedious relationship drama between Lindy and Les as their already shaky marriage buckles underneath the stress of the extraordinary circumstances.

“All of us suck,” Lulu says concerning the Littlejohn household in a late-season episode, and she or he’s fully proper. Lindy and Les are each unbearable as people, and so they clearly deliver out the worst in one another. That may be tolerable if The Miniature Spouse have been a full-on darkish comedy, and there’s a interval round midseason when the battle between the spouses will get near the nastiness of one thing like The Conflict of the Roses. However Lindy’s opening declaration that “It is a love story” appears meant to be taken at face worth, and the efforts to painting the Littlejohns as a pair value rooting for change into more and more strained and unconvincing because the sequence progresses. Banks and Macfadyen don’t have any chemistry, both as lovers or as adversaries, and Macfadyen too usually errors mugging for emoting.

As science fiction, The Miniature Spouse is underwhelming, stuffed with complicated-sounding but in the end meaningless mathematical jargon and far-fetched logical leaps, with particular results that often don’t even match as much as the visuals in 1981’s Lily Tomlin comedy The Unbelievable Shrinking Girl, one other apparent affect. “I’ve created a tiny monster,” Les laments, however he offers himself an excessive amount of credit score. All he has actually carried out is create a tiny irritation.