The Vacancy

His & Hers arrives on Netflix polished, competently produced, and instantly familiar. It moves efficiently through its beats. The dialogue lands where it should. The mystery unfolds without friction. Nothing about it is broken, yet nothing about it feels necessary. It is the kind of story designed not to challenge the viewer, but to reassure them that they’ve seen this before and will want to see it again. And that is precisely the problem.

The contemporary publishing-to-screen pipeline has become a closed loop of comfortability. Literary agents, once curators of bold voices and singular visions, now function largely as market filters seeking projects that already resemble proven successes or their own personal preferences. Romantasy clones. Enemies-to-lovers with interchangeable coats of paint. Domestic crime thrillers that borrow the aesthetic grammar of Pretty Little Liars and mistake secrets for substance. The reward is not innovation, but compliance. And His & Hers is a perfect case study of such compliance. 

On paper, it checks every modern box: dual perspectives, marital tension, buried trauma, an unreliable narrative that promises revelation but delivers familiarity. It is engineered for bingeability rather than resonance. The structure doesn’t surprise because it’s meant to be a fix. The twists don’t destabilize because they’ve been focus-tested into safety. The story exists not to say something new, but to fulfill an expectation already shaped by market demand. Something that wasn’t always the case.

There was a time when the industry rewarded risk and when fresh takes on new ideas were allowed to exist so long as the writing justified them. Stories could be strange, uneven, or divisive and still be supported because they expanded the conversation. Now, originality is treated as a liability unless it can be easily pitched alongside three recent comps. If it doesn’t fit a sub-genre already trending on BookTok or streaming dashboards, it is quietly passed over. The result is oversaturation without evolution. Writers are no longer encouraged to explore; they are encouraged to optimize. To narrow their voice until it fits neatly into a shelf already crowded with near-identical spines. Creativity is not killed outright but redirected into repetition. The industry doesn’t reject talent, it trains it to self-censor.

His & Hers exemplifies this erosion. What’s lost in this cycle is not just originality, but trust in the audience. The assumption now is that readers and viewers want familiarity above all else, that they crave the emotional equivalent of reheated leftovers. And when that assumption becomes policy the industry collapses inward, mistaking trends for taste and metrics for meaning. 

Comfort food has its place. But when comfort becomes the only acceptable flavor, the culture starves. His & Hers didn’t break the writing industry. It simply proves how thoroughly it’s learned to survive without imagination.