Comedy
Best Medicine
In Fox’s Best Medicine, uptight city surgeon Dr. Martin Best moves to small-town Port Wenn and learns to get along with its quirky residents.
No one is quite sure who killed Rachel Hopkins.
The 40-year-old woman was found stabbed on the hood of her own car in the middle of Chattahoochee National Forest after a rainstorm. News anchor Anna Andrews and local detective Jack Harper think Rachel was murdered. After all, you don’t get stabbed 40 times in the chest and call it an accident.
However, as Anna says, there are two sides to every story—and Jack and Anna each have their own tale to tell.
Jack, we soon learn, was having an affair with Rachel. In fact, they were having sex just before Rachel’s untimely demise, making Jack a prime suspect.
But Anna had a complicated past with the deceased as well. They were friends once, and the coroner finds Anna’s friendship bracelet inside the victim’s mouth.
Did Jack murder his lover in a passionate fury? Did Anna kill the woman in a fit of rage? Or was it someone else entirely—perhaps Rachel’s husband, who mysteriously failed to report her missing to police?
Everyone is acting cagey. Anyone could be a suspect. But someone is certainly lying.
Netflix’s His & Hers is based on the novel of the same name by Alice Feeney. The murder mystery is packed with intrigue … and serious content concerns.
For starters, Jack and Anna are married. So the fact that Jack was having an affair with Rachel (who is also married) certainly gives weight to the possibility that Anna might’ve killed her. But Anna left Jack a year ago after the unexpected death of their child. In fact, Jack lost his job as a police detective in Atlanta because he used up resources trying to track Anna down instead of doing his job. That doesn’t exactly suggest that Anna was pining for Jack. Plus, the day that Anna shows back up in their small hometown to investigate Rachel’s death, she starts up her own affair with another married man.
Oh, and those extramarital affairs play out graphically onscreen. There’s partial nudity and plenty of movement and noise. Language is obscene, too. Characters seem partial to f-word and abusing Jesus’ name.
And let’s not forget that this is a murder investigation. The first scene of this miniseries shows Rachel bleeding out, twitching helplessly as she takes her final breaths. Later, we see each of the 40 knife wounds she took to the chest in the coroner’s office (her corpse is naked). And a glance at the show’s trailer suggests that more violence is sure to follow.
Whodunnits can sometimes be fun to solve, but when a mystery is wrapped in sex, murder, foul language, heavy imbibing, extramarital affairs and racial tensions (perhaps to be expected in a show set in the Deep South), you just have to wonder if it’s even worth investigating.
(Editor’s Note: Plugged In is rarely able to watch every episode of a given series for review. As such, there’s always a chance that you might see a problem that we didn’t. If you notice content that you feel should be included in our review, send us an email at letters@pluggedin.com, or contact us via Facebook or Instagram, and be sure to let us know the episode number, title and season so that we can check it out.)
Anna Andrews and Jack Harper each separately investigate the murder of Rachel Hopkins, a woman to whom they’re both inextricably linked.
A woman bleeds out on the hood of her car, twitching as she takes her final breaths. We later see her naked body in the coroner’s office, each stab wound (40, we’re told) cleaned and prominently displayed. The coroner says there were no defensive wounds. She also says someone had sex with the victim either immediately before or immediately after killing her.
Jack and Anna, who have been separated for a year after Anna disappeared without a trace, each have an extramarital affair. (Their paramours are also married to other people.) We see these affairs take place in graphic sex scenes with partial nudity (critical bits are covered by clothing). In one scene, Jack overhears Anna having sex through a hotel door. He interrupts by knocking—though he walks away before confronting his wife, apparently just wanting to upset her with the interruption. We later see that Anna also spotted Jack having sex with another woman in the back of his truck. We see people in their underwear.
A woman chugs wine from a bottle. Jack lightly reprimands his hungover sister for drinking so heavily the night before. She defends that “vodka is cheaper than Ambien.”
Jack dotes on his niece, apparently trying to be a father figure for the girl in her parents’ absence (her dad isn’t present and her mom apparently has a drinking problem). He has also been taking care of Anna’s mom, who is showing signs of dementia or something similar. (Police apparently found her wandering the road naked in the middle of the night, and she seems to have short-term memory loss.)
Unfortunately, those kindnesses don’t make up for Jack’s other bad behaviors. When Anna shows up unexpectedly, he stalks her, and his obsession causes him to neglect his niece. He talks down to other police officers, and his attitude and mannerisms suggest that he’s the sort of guy who thinks he could get away with murder.
There are clearly some racial tensions. It’s suggested Anna (who is Black) may have faced prejudice in her small hometown growing up. There are some sexist jokes made about female news anchors.
Anna gets upset when she learns she was replaced by a white news anchor. She requests to be paired up with her replacement’s husband (who is a cameraman at the station) for the investigation. She shamelessly flirts with the man, suggesting that his wife’s new job has prevented them from having sex and created a power imbalance. She then takes the guy back to her hotel room to have sex.
Anna breaks a promise to not leak the victim’s name in the news. Reporters descend upon the crime scene like vultures. People break rules and laws. Anna and Jack are generally antagonistic toward each other. A woman investigates a swollen sore on her gum, and a dentist later tells her it’s infected. We learn that Anna lost a child.
We hear about 15 uses of the f-word, as well as the s-word, “d–n” and “h—.” God’s name is misused thrice (once paired with “d–mit”). Jesus’ name is abused seven times.
Emily studied film and writing when she was in college. And when she isn’t being way too competitive while playing board games, she enjoys food, sleep, and geeking out with her husband indulging in their “nerdoms,” which is the collective fan cultures of everything they love, such as Star Wars, Star Trek, Stargate and Lord of the Rings.
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