Why His & Hers is a masterclass in gaslighting the audience? Explained

Netflix’s His & Hers throws Tessa Thompson and Jon Bernthal together in a six-episode mystery thriller, based on Alice Feeney’s 2020 novel. The show hit screens on January 8, 2026.

It follows Anna Andrews, a withdrawn news anchor from Atlanta, and her estranged husband, Detective Jack Harper. They find themselves back in their Georgia hometown, Dahlonega, pulled into a murder case that refuses to let them go. Anna and Jack lost a child a year ago, and that pain still hangs between them. Now, forced to work side by side, they can’t help but suspect each other, because both are hiding something.

The setup puts you into conflicting viewpoints and shaky narration, daring you to pick a side. His & Hers splits the crowd. Thompson and Bernthal turn in some great performances, but the show loves to hold back information, almost to a fault. Sometimes it just gets under your skin with how awkwardly it hides the truth. It’s not just the characters who are unreliable; the story keeps twisting things around, so you end up feeling like the show is messing with your head on purpose.

Disclaimer: The article contains the writer's personal opinions. Reader discretion is advised.

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How His & Hers gaslights the audience in plain sight

The series employs the tagline:

“There are two sides of every story. Yours and mine. Ours and theirs. His and hers. Which means someone is always lying.”

To be exact, the show is not “gaslighting” in the clinical, interpersonal-abuse meaning. You, the viewer, are not really in a relationship with these characters. But His & Hers employs gaslighting mechanics as a narrative device in the most literal sense: it constantly betrays you into thinking that you saw something, came to a conclusion about it, and have a clue as to what is happening, then punishes you for being sure about it. And it does it so well that by the time the last twist hits you, the series has been conditioning you to question your own judgement.

Here’s how it pulls that off.

It uses the “two sides” premise to cause you to discredit the fact. The central aspect of His & Hers is fairness: you will listen to both Anna and Jack, and you will be able to choose who lies. But the structure is a trap. The series is not portraying two equal sides; it is portraying two edited distortions.

When a thriller delivers you two POVs, you think that the truth is somewhere in the middle. His & Hers play about with instinct. It causes you to treat each scene as an argument, not a fact. Even when something appears simple, an alibi, a motive, a timeline, you are already in a state of thinking: Yes, but who is viewing it?

That is the gaslighting 101 of the audience: get the viewer to discredit themselves.

It makes red herrings emotional commitments. Many murder mysteries lay red herrings in your pathway. His & Hers makes you invest in them.

The sketchy background of Jack, the implication of the affair, the whispers in the towns, the rivals, these are not merely plot devices. They are meant to be like answers you deserve. When the show then later pulls the rug away, it is not merely a surprise. It is the more insidious, grimmer emotion of: I made a complete case in my head, and it was never concrete.

Even negative reviews that criticize how coherent the show is still recognize that the resolution is a full-body swerve.

It does not lie; it selectively withholds, so that you can’t catch it lying. The best audience-gaslighting stories are not fabricated; they leave something out. His & Hers takes care of that.

It points you in the right direction by showing you enough to conclude, but then leaves you with a piece of the puzzle that does not nullify what you had seen, but simply puts it into a new context. This is why the twist of the finale is so powerful: you can watch the previous scenes again and understand that the show did not lie to you, it was simply telling you not the entire story.

The ending breakdown by Netflix itself is tilted towards this premise that the truth was there all along; it was just impossible to read until the very end.

It is playing who do you trust and silently making it impossible to trust. His & Hers is more or less a trust fall into a pit.

Anna is a journalist, a person we are conditioned to think tells the truth, but her presence is explosive and burdened. Jack is a policeman, one whom we have been conditioned to identify with facts and procedure, but his conduct is subjective and emotional. His & Hers rigs the two truth-teller archetypes in such a way that neither one can entirely perform the role.

Thus, the audience finds itself drifting in this tiresome middle ground: she is hiding something, he is hiding something, maybe everyone is hiding something. And when your default turns to suspicion, the series may turn you where it likes.

It employs a harmless character as the ultimate disguise of the story. And then to the grand one: the disclosure that changes all.

Several recaps and explainers verify that the killer is the mother of Anna, Alice, who is first introduced as a frail woman with dementia, but in reality, she is acting weak as a camouflage. That is not a twist, but that is a thesis statement on perception.

I believe that His & Hers is fully aware of what it is doing in this case: it is capitalizing on the preconceptions of the audience regarding who can be violent and who can be safely neglected. The show challenges you not to ignore Alice since the world has conditioned you to ignore women like Alice, older, apparently confused, coded as non-threatening. Even the final explanation that Elle gives throws light on how the “frailty” that is the read is included in the cover story.

That is gaslighting the audience at its purest: you have not been fooled by a false hint. Your own prejudice deceived you about what is important.

It makes trauma a retroactive motor engine. His & Hers also plays an emotional game of its own, linking crimes to long-repressed cruelty and trauma of Anna in her previous circle, along with the revelations as to what happened to Anna as a teenager herself, and what Alice feels she is “correcting” through revenge.

The uncomfortable part of that is that, as soon as that context comes in, your moral math begins to shift. You are still horrified, but the show asks you to sympathize with the internal reasoning of the killer as though such understanding is the same as justification (it is not). That tension keeps you psychologically off-balance up to the last minutes. And that off-balance feeling is the point. Since His & Hers can make your feelings destabilize, it can make your certainty destabilize, too.

It concludes by depriving you of the solace of a clean truth. His & Hers does not give you a moral bow even after the reveal. The resolution is tilted towards uncertainty of relationships and consequences: who forgives whom, who leaves, and what are, in fact, the implications of moving on after such a reckoning.

That is the final gaslight: you do not leave with a closure. It leaves you with a feeling that the story is still rearranging in your mind.

Is it really a masterclass then? I’d argue yes, specifically as a craft lesson in viewer manipulation.