If you haven't already been put off miniaturisation by that episode of The Boys where that Ant-Man-esque super-shrinker climbed into some poor guy's urethra… boy, have we got the show for you. The Miniature Wife, a new series starring Matthew Macfadyen and Elizabeth Banks, has just been ordered by the U.S. streaming service Peacock, and promises to be the Honey, I Shrunk the Kids x Succession x Marriage Story crossover we didn't realise we needed.
As the unctuous Tom Wambsgans, the British actor is coming to collect an Emmy
Assuming the show sticks to the short story it's based on — written by Manuel Gonzalez, and published as part of a wider short story collection — Banks will be shrunk to the size of a coffee cup, and Macfadyen will portray her panicked inventor husband who inadvertently did the shrinking.
A logline provided by Deadline, who broke the news on 25 March, calls the show a “high-concept marital dramedy examining the power (im)balances between spouses Lindy (Banks) and Les (Macfadyen), who battle each other for supremacy after a technological accident induces the ultimate relationship crisis.”
One can only presume, then, that Macfadyen's character will not be given a shrinking fetish in this version. Drat! When will we get the shrinking fetish representation society desperately needs?
Here's everything we know about The Miniature Wife.
It's adapted from a collection of weird and wacky short stories
Going by its three-and-a-half star Good Reads score, Gonzalez's The Miniature Wife and Other Stories is kinda like literary marmite: you might love it, you might hate it, but whatever the case, it will put you in a trance-like, hallucinatory state.
The fantastical stories in the collection range from the titular one about a beleaguered mini-wife (Banks' character in the TV adaptation), which you can read here, to one about a composer who can “speak through his ears,” the inevitable gender bent A24 version of which will star Cate Blanchett.
When is The Miniature Wife out?
It's just announced as ordered at Peacock, which would suggest that we're a fair ways away from actually getting our eyes on it. In the meantime, you can 3-D print a coffee-cup-sized version of your significant other and torment them for fun.
