Matthew Macfadyen plays Les Littlejohn, a husband who shrinks his wife to six inches, in Peacock’s “The Miniature Wife,” which premieres Thursday. The series puts a disaster at the center of a marriage and lets it spiral into something stranger, funnier and more combustible than the premise alone suggests.
Elizabeth Banks plays Lindy Littlejohn, and the two-time Oscar-winning adaptation of her earlier book success looms over the story even as her character tries to escape Les and his mess. Banks said of the series, “This is a love story,” before adding, “Fair warning, it’s going to get worse before it gets better.” That warning fits a show built around a husband whose public claim to fame is a superior GMO tomato and whose private breakthrough is the ability to make things small.
Les and Lindy live in St. Louis, where he once hoped to build “the Menlo Park of the Midwest” and where he still talks like a man waiting for history to catch up with him. He sees himself as in “last chance at greatness,” chasing “the bioagritech that will change the world,” while Lindy carries the memory of having made a smash with “My Rainbow Starts With Black” two decades earlier. That novel was described as a Pulitzer Prize-winning work, and its film adaptation won an Oscar, but Lindy has not written a word since.
The series was created by Jennifer Ames and Steve Turner and is based on a 2013 short story by Manuel Gonzales. The adaptation stretches the material with extra characters, plot points, details and backstory, pushing the story toward a television-sized ending instead of the shorter, sharper arc of the original. It also makes Les’ secrecy part of the pressure cooker: his miniaturization work stays hidden from Lindy, and the one thing he can do reliably is make objects smaller, only for them to blow up when he tries to turn them large again.
That instability runs through the rest of the cast as well. Lindy is ending an emotional affair with Les’ right hand, Richard, played by O-T Fagbenle, while her agent, played by Sian Clifford, has already passed a manuscript to The New Yorker that was actually written by Lindy’s student. The result is a messy, energetic science fiction farce that turns ambition, desire and professional humiliation into one increasingly volatile family breakdown.
By Thursday, Peacock will have put Macfadyen and Banks at the center of a story that starts as a marital trick and ends as a reckoning. Les wants greatness, Lindy wants out, and the show’s answer to the central question is blunt: the shrinking may be absurd, but the damage is real, and it only gets worse from here.