What it is
Les, a Nobel-chasing scientist, accidentally shrinks his wife Lindy to six inches tall. That's the premise, but the show is less interested in the science fiction than in what it reveals about a marriage where one person was already being made to feel small. Elizabeth Banks and Matthew Macfadyen play it completely straight, which is what makes it work.
What it's about
- Power in a marriage, made literal.The shrinking isn't a metaphor the show dances around. It states it plainly and then builds ten episodes of comedy and discomfort on top of it.
- A husband who treats catastrophe like an inconvenience.Macfadyen plays Les as a man so wrapped up in his own ambition that his wife's crisis is, first and foremost, a problem for his schedule. It's funny in the way that watching someone be oblivious is funny, until it isn't.
- Absurdist sci-fi with real emotional stakes.The show earns the silliness by never winking at the camera. Banks commits to the physical comedy and the rage in equal measure, and the tonal balance between the two is what keeps it from feeling like a gimmick.
- A binge that front-loads its best material.The first half moves quickly and lands its best jokes. The back half slows down and gets more emotional. Whether that's a feature or a problem depends on what you showed up for.
If you've seen...
Honey, I Shrunk the Kids meets Marriage Story
The high-concept body comedy of the former, the raw relationship autopsy of the latter. Less whimsical than you'd expect from the premise, more fun than you'd expect from the comparison.
Severance but domestic
Same energy of using a sci-fi concept to say something uncomfortably specific about how people actually live. Severance does it with work. This does it with marriage.
Catastrophe with a genre twist
If you liked watching two smart people be terrible to each other while clearly still in love, the dynamic is similar. The shrinking just removes the ability to pretend things are fine.
What critics agree on
Two things. First: Elizabeth Banks and Matthew Macfadyen are better than the show sometimes deserves. Banks makes exhaustion, fear, and rage land in a performance that's largely physical, and Macfadyen plays oblivious ego with the energy of a toddler in a lab coat. Second: ten episodes is probably too many. The consensus is that the show would have been sharper as a movie or a short limited series. The middle episodes lose momentum, and a few subplots never earn their screen time. But when it's working, it's doing something genuinely specific about what it feels like to be dismissed by someone who loves you.
What fans talk about
People binged this in a day. That's the first thing. It hit #1 on Peacock almost immediately, and the word-of-mouth has been "just watch it, it's better than it sounds." The main conversation is about whether the show actually pulls off its central metaphor or whether it leans on it too hard. Fans who love it point to the episodes where the marriage dynamics get genuinely uncomfortable. Fans who bounced tend to cite the pacing in the back half, where the show tries to be more emotional and loses some of the comedic engine that got them hooked. Macfadyen's performance gets its own discourse. People keep comparing him to his Succession character, which isn't wrong but also isn't the whole picture. He's playing a different kind of pathetic here, and it works.
Watch the trailer