Move Over, Dead Wives—Thriller Series Are Propped Up by Dead Children Now

Warning: This story contains light spoilers about His & Hers. About 15 years ago, it seemed that all you needed to do to give a male character purpose was to kill the woman he loves. While this wasn’t a new storytelling phenomenon exclusive to the ‘00s and ‘10s, it happened with such frequency that a trope was born: the "dead wife." In countless movies and TV shows, repeated gauzy flashbacks of a beautiful woman lying in bed, bathed in sunshine (Memento) indicate happier times before the Grim Reaper came calling. She might also appear as a ghostly hallucination (hello, Grace in Peaky Blinders) to needle his guilt, act as a moral compass, or offer a surface-level reminder of an aching loss. She will rarely get to be anything more than a pretty symbol of masculine failings and feelings.

In the years since Gone Girl took this missing-or-murdered cliché and spun it on its head, filmmakers like Christopher Nolan have since cooled on this kind of plotting (to a degree). But move over, dead wives, there is another deceased relative serving motivation, suspense, and conflict in an array of TV thrillers that are starting to resemble a mystery turducken.

Stuffed inside the overarching case that needs solving—a murder, kidnapping, or government conspiracy—is a different tragedy from the past that has left marriages in pieces and still-open wounds. In the streaming era, the loss of a child has become a plot shortcut that informs frayed relationships, heightens tension, delivers the requisite snapshot of a blissful era, and, eventually, the moment the loss occurred. But as the number of examples centering on the ultimate parenting nightmare grows, so does the ability to see through a narrative that uses trauma as a means to excuse behavior, and draw out sympathy, while avoiding revealing how the death happened until the conclusion draws near.

The new year has barely begun, and Netflix’s unpredictable His & Hers joins the “dead child” list, alongside recent entries like The Beast in Me, All Her Fault, Untamed, and The Last Frontier. The six-part limited series, adapted from mystery-thriller writer Alice Feeney’s best-selling 2020 novel of the same name, sees Tessa Thompson and Jon Bernthal play estranged spouses and grieving parents who reunite during a murder investigation in their sleepy Georgia hometown. The couple hasn’t seen each other for a year, and pieces fall into place about what led to the schism between TV reporter Anna Andrews (Thompson) and Detective Jack Harper (Bernthal) across the first few episodes.

To the credit of the whiplash-inducing His & Hers, it doesn’t leave us in the dark about the particulars of baby Charlotte’s death until the penultimate episode, which has become a frustrating go-to strategy for TV shows boasting myriad twists and turns like All Her Fault and The Beast in Me. It is refreshing that it only takes Jack and Anna a couple of episodes before they directly discuss losing their nearly 9-month-old infant; by the mid-way point, their unresolved issues have come to a head. And it is here that His & Hers offers compelling insight: Anger, resentment, shame, guilt, love, and even lust make a potent mix, with Thompson and Bernthal selling the hell out of a confessional that has been a year in the making for the couple. While His & Hers makes some wild swings in the overall whodunnit, hashing out their grief is not an afterthought or a last-minute twist to shock. The infant’s death, however, indirectly kicks off the string of killings, and themes of motherhood are central to the motive; His & Hers doesn’t entirely sidestep the ‘dead child’ tropes.

Thompson and Bernthal join the likes of Claire Danes, Sarah Snook, Eric Bana, and Jason Clarke in delivering compelling, heart-aching performances rooted in bereavement. Still, even award-winning turns can’t stop this storytelling device from edging into tired and emotionally manipulative trope territory. It isn’t enough to see Emmy-winning actors serving top-tier cry-face or dancing around the answers when the pacing treats it like another clue to the central crime. Pulling on our heartstrings with images of little blonde boys or cute babies is no better than the dead wife flashing a smile to the camera.

Of course, some of this comes from the source material. While the death of the child is part of Feeney’s book plot, William Oldroyd’s adaptation adjusts Jack and Anna’s marital status from divorced to estranged. Not being on the same page about how to deal with grief is what causes both, but the screen version adds layers to this experience in its depiction of the aftermath.

While there is little empirical evidence to support this, an often-repeated stat that up to 90 percent of couples divorce after the death of a child comes from Harriet Schiff’s 1977 book The Bereaved Parent. This theory prevails in the aforementioned series: Only The Last Frontier features a couple still living together, and even that union is hanging by a thread. By the end of All Her Fault, Marissa (Snook) has taken drastic action to ensure the safety of the child in her care. The Peacock abduction thriller keeps pulling rabbits out of hats with each new reveal about Marissa’s husband, Peter (Jake Lacy).

In these recent series, one area where this narrative excels over the "dead wife" (or fridging) plot is that it doesn’t focus solely on the male protagonist's motivation or on explaining his erratic choices. It is an equal-opportunity device for both parents to explore the nuances of a relationship in the aftermath of an unspeakable loss. All Her Fault and His & Hers both have female showrunners, and Danes (an executive producer on The Beast in Me) has spoken about the maternal grief research she undertook before playing Aggie Wiggs. The push-pull depicted in these three titles of navigating trauma and how the public or a spouse might perceive it adds a compelling layer through the female gaze. Still, there is also a question of whether an audience can only sympathize if this loss is predicated on a child. Would we feel differently if the trope were centered on dead husbands?

Career is another focus that can center on either parent and also exhibits repeat patterns. Given that a character’s work is often entwined with feelings of guilt, particularly for those characters in law enforcement who either see their job as the direct cause (The Last Frontier) or blame themselves for not having kept their child safe (Untamed). In The Beast in Me, Aggie was participating in a phone interview while driving her son to an appointment when tragedy struck; Aggie holds the drunk driver responsible for her son’s death. The inevitable later-season flashback to how it happened shows a distracted Aggie, and her guilt curdles into a desire for vengeance against the driver. Aggie only loses her writer's block when suspected wife-killer Nile Jarvis (Matthew Rhys) becomes her subject, and she is drawn to the danger. The murder-mystery and the responsibility she feels for her son’s death overlap.

Personal and professional intersect as Jack and Anna navigate their significant heartbreak in His & Hers; it does take a string of homicides to set the scene for reconciliation. Their child’s death is not a salacious bonus solution revealed late in the game. While there is a throughline between this awful event and the unfolding violence, it doesn’t turn a tragedy into a cheap mystery thriller trope. Even still, if TV writers insist on using this plotting, they need to get more inventive, as flashbacks of playgrounds, toys, and cribs are going to become as rote as a dead wife rolling around in bed sheets. Instead of hitting the heart, these memories, serving as character motivation, will become so familiar that the only emotion they will illicit is annoyance—or worse, boredom.