Mrs. Fletcher
Mrs. Fletcher
A dual coming-of-age comedy exploring the impact of internet porn and social media, Mrs. Fletcher follows empty nest divorcée Eve Fletcher — as she reinvents her life to find the happiness and sexual fulfillment that’s eluded her, and her college freshman son Brendan.
Razorbitz reviewedMay 18, 2025
A series where the performances do most of the legwork, yet fails to deliver on the very premise it initially offers.
The titular Mrs. Fletcher is an at times captivating performance and is the main draw of the series, working best in the all too seldom scenes with her and her son that highlights the layers of dysfunction in her previous family life. Unfortunately so little of the time used across the series 8 episodes feels like it was used well, and despite this being an HBO series adapting a book I was surprised to see how little of the original narrative was kept intact, shying away from delivering a true examination of the sexual reawakening and rebuilding of personal character (like that found in the book) and instead fixating needlessly on drama and a poor attempt at setting itself up for a second season instead of delivering a tight adaptation for a novel that works best as a novel to begin with.
The ending--if it could be called that--feels more shocking in its exploitation of the shock and its utter lack of eploration as to the actual purpose, feeling in the final scene like a cheaply scripted film stretched over 8 hours with little else to show.
It's a shame, then, that within the meandering there are some incredible moments that lead to minimal payoff. The highlight of the show is the second main character in Mrs. Fletcher's stunted d-bag of a son who has been so coddled and vindicated throughout his life by his parents and internalized the treatment of his mother and women in general that he goes through a genuinely fascinating arc of almost--but not quite--becoming a better person. There are subtleties and examinations here (that feel almost unintentional given the rest of the series) that deserve to be extracted and appreciated for how it examines the average college age guy of this era. The weight of moral ambigueity and the slow, agonizing moments of realization of a guy who has been checked out his whole life are simply on another level--but as the series isn't about him in the end, and the end being what it is, the potential character arc is deferred indefinitely, and we are left only with a questionable conclusion and mediocre implications for what will never come.
Why this was intended to be a series is beyond me; at best a solid film or miniseries would have potentially done wonders with the pacing. In all, Mrs. Fletcher stands as an ultimately dissapointing curiosity of the purged HBO catalogue and little more.