‘The Couple Next Door’ Review: Starz’s Silly Polyamory Thriller

It takes less than five minutes for Starz and Channel 4‘s new six-part series The Couple Next Door to make its first reference to Desperate Housewives.

Pete (Alfred Enoch), a journalist at a struggling newspaper, and Evie (Eleanor Tomlinson), a pregnant primary school teacher, are moving into a cul-de-sac in Leeds. They’re reflecting on a version of suburbia that’s more American, or even fictional American, in nature than British, so the comparison is close to inevitable; Pete looks at the dog-walking, lawn-tending, externally obsessed neighborhood they’re moving into and assumes a communal beneath-the-surface rot that does, indeed, eventually emerge.

It’s the last Desperate Housewives reference in the series because, to put it simply, The Couple Next Door isn’t finally all that much like Desperate Housewives, especially the top-tier early seasons of Desperate Housewives that one might want to be compared to. The adaptation of a Dutch format — Nieuwe Buren, which I definitely haven’t seen — offers very little humor and fails completely as a twisty, propulsive thriller, making its only appeal as an exploration of a modern polyamorous relationship, a thing it examines on a level far less sophisticated than what was featured in Starz’s Three Women.

And if you’re thinking, “But you didn’t like Three Women!” Indeed, I did not. Three Women was a well-acted structural failure, but it had things on its mind and an interesting take on female desire. The Couple Next Door avoids almost anything thoughtful, and as an erotic thriller, written and directed by men, its top gear stops at “hungry glances” as opposed to actual sexual provocation. Because its stars are inarguably attractive and capable of stirring up at least a modicum of chemistry, there are times when The Couple Next Door maybe lives up to its junk-food aspirations, but it’s mostly thin gruel.

Anyway, Evie and Pete move into their new hood and they’re immediately greeted warmly by the couple across the street — the show isn’t great with geography, but I’m pretty sure its title is inaccurate — Becka, a yoga instructor and VERY low-level social media influencer (Jessica De Gouw), and Danny (Sam Heughan), a motorcycle cop. Becka and Danny have a son when it’s dramatically convenient — I’ve never seen a show so casually eager to tell us when a child character is being watched by unseen relatives or staying over with unseen friends. But mostly they’re swingers and their interest in Evie, embodying what Eric Carmen described as “Hungry Eyes,” and Pete, uncomfortable with everything to the point of accidental comedy, quickly escalates.

When The Couple Next Door is just about these four very pretty people leering over each other and then making a mess of everything in wholly predictable ways, it has a sizzling competence. The actual sex scenes are barely PG-13 — imagine telling somebody a decade ago that the Starz of Spartacus and other blood-and-boobs epics would end up skimping on nudity and gratuitous boinking — but it’s easy to understand why these two couples would be curious. For Becka and Danny, it’s a lifestyle that comes with rules and ample experience. For Evie, the attraction is tied to childhood repression. And for Pete? Well, he’s uncomfortable. With everything.

Within the confines of this potential foursome, there are opportunities for psychological rigor, as well as chances to deal with issues including religious fundamentalism, male infertility and the gendering of romantic obsession. But writer David Allison and director Dries Vos just aren’t interested in making The Couple Next Door be deeply about the thing that it’s supposed to be about.

Instead, the six episodes are propped up by thriller elements that are all various degrees of shoddy. There’s a one-dimensional plotline involving neighbor Alan (Hugh Dennis), a creepy voyeur, and his long-suffering wife Jean (Kate Robbins), which comes close — not THAT close — to working because Dennis and Robbins are good, even if their characters are not. Danny, however, is embroiled in a dangerous situation with a corrupt local businessman that’s generally ludicrous, while Pete’s parallel investigation into that corruption case is consistently ludicrous. I think it might be possible to care a tiny bit about the stuff with the peeping neighbors, which is Rear Window without any of the nuance or style or purpose, but I lack the creativity to imagine an ideal viewer who might find the other thriller storylines anywhere close to compelling. There’s a lot of garbage in The Couple Next Door and by the fourth and fifth episodes, the garbage is steering the garbage truck.

Keeping the show watchable, at least until the violence-filled finale when it mostly is unwatchable, are the four main stars — including Enoch’s semi-comic turn that’s either unintentional or discordant with everything else in the series, but made me chuckle once or twice.

Bulked up to an almost Reacher-ian degree, Outlander star Heughan makes a strong case to join 50 Cent as Starz’s main poster boy. His mumbling, brooding presence has little hints of Stanley Kowalski magnetism and he has the only subplot that improves as the show progresses. Very little that De Gouw’s character does makes much sense — the logical flaws in almost everything become all-consuming by the end — but the Aussie actress is convincing enough to briefly make you believe that somebody with no interest in social media would be enjoying the fruits of being an influencer, and that somebody with only 30,000 followers would be notable as an influencer. Tomlinson is great for the first half of the season, as Evie goes through personal grief and comes out desperate and damaged. But as the show gets into late-series moralizing that was already retrograde back in the days of Fatal Attraction, anything grounded about that character gets lost.

Channel 4 has already ordered a second season of The Couple Next Door with a new cast, which points not to the finality of any of the story arcs in these six episodes, but the likely finality of viewer interest in those stories. So keep trying again with this partner-swapping stuff, Starz! Third time might be the charm.