Elizabeth Banks and Matthew Macfadyen’s sci-fi show The Miniature Wife underwhelms

Miniature people have been a staple of science fiction and fantasy going all the way back to Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, and shrunken characters have taken the spotlight in everything from classic Hollywood movies like Bride of Frankenstein and Fantastic Voyage to family-friendly blockbusters like Ant-Man and Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. References to these movies and others are strewn throughout the new Peacock limited series The Miniature Wife, but the drawn-out, 10-episode show isn’t a particularly worthwhile addition to the sci-fi shrinking canon.

Taking only the title and basic premise from Manuel Gonzales’s 2014 short story, The Miniature Wife stars Elizabeth Banks as Lindy Littlejohn, a once-prominent author who now works as a university professor and has been overshadowed by her scientist husband Les (Matthew Macfadyen). Lindy, you see, feels metaphorically small in both her personal and professional lives, and is about to become literally small following an accident – or is it? – with Les’s potentially world-changing invention, a compound that shrinks objects to approximately 1/12th their original size.

The most pressing problem for Lindy is that Les has yet to develop a stable antidote to his formula, and everything that he has attempted to return to its original size thus far has almost immediately exploded. Since this is a bloated modern prestige streaming series, though, Lindy has other, less interesting problems, including a convoluted plagiarism scandal involving a short story by one of her students that was inadvertently published under her name in The New Yorker. She has also been having an “emotional affair” with Les’s colleague Richard (O-T Fagbenle), whose interest in her is far more ardent than hers in him.

Meanwhile, Les has signed a deal with an obviously evil oligarch (Ronny Chieng, recycling his obnoxious tech bro persona from M3GAN) and has only 30 days to produce the antidote before losing the rights to all of his work. The Miniature Wife devotes a lot of time to tiresome office politics at Les’s company, where the demanding but sultry scientist Vivienne (Zoe Lister-Jones) has been appointed as his new boss. There are also substantial subplots for the Littlejohns’ university-student daughter Lulu (Sofia Rosinsky) and Lindy’s editor and best friend Terry (Sian Clifford), which serve as nothing but padding for a meandering, unfocused series.

Creators Jennifer Ames and Steve Turner should have started by shrinking their show’s episodes, which are about 45 minutes each and awkwardly split the difference between comedy and drama. The Miniature Wife features some typical shrunken-person antics for Lindy as she takes up residence in a doll’s house and has to fight off insects and household pets, along with tedious relationship drama between Lindy and Les as their already shaky marriage buckles under the pressure of the extraordinary circumstances.

“We all suck,” Lulu says about the Littlejohn family in a late-season episode, and she’s entirely right. Lindy and Les are both insufferable as individuals, and they clearly bring out the worst in each other. That might be tolerable if The Miniature Wife were a full-on dark comedy, and there’s a period around midseason when the battle between the spouses gets close to the nastiness of something like The War of the Roses. But Lindy’s opening declaration that “This is a love story” seems meant to be taken at face value, and the efforts to portray the Littlejohns as a couple worth rooting for become increasingly strained and unconvincing as the series progresses. Banks and Macfadyen have no chemistry, either as lovers or as adversaries, and Macfadyen too often mistakes mugging for emoting.

As science fiction, The Miniature Wife is underwhelming, full of complicated-sounding yet ultimately meaningless mathematical jargon and far-fetched logical leaps, with special effects that frequently don’t even match up to the visuals in 1981’s Lily Tomlin comedy The Incredible Shrinking Woman, another obvious influence. “I’ve created a tiny monster,” Les laments, but he gives himself too much credit. All he has really done is create a tiny irritation.