Teaser for “The Miniature Wife” (2026) Showcases a Domestic Mishap Unlike Any Other

A certain cult-favorite franchise from the late ’80s and ’90s never gave us an installment titled “Honey, I Shrunk You,” but the storyline for such a film will come to Peacock next month with the title “The Miniature Wife.” This will not be a movie, but a series, starring Matthew Macfadyen and Elizabeth Banks as a married couple whose relationship is very suddenly and drastically changed after an accident of the sort seen in the aforementioned franchise.

Elizabeth Banks Wakes Up Tiny

If nothing else, the teaser for “The Miniature Wife,” which dropped on YouTube on Feb. 5, certainly knows how to grab your attention. Its opening plunges you right into the series’s titular predicament, showing Lindy (Banks) waking up in her bed to the sound of her doorbell. Taped to the inside of the door is a note that reads “Please don’t freak out,” and when she opens it, she sees the enormous face of her husband, Les (Macfadyen), looking in at her. She is now no taller than a few inches, and she’s living in some kind of very elaborate dollhouse, which he can split apart when he wants to access and talk with her more easily.

What may have transpired to make Lindy the miniature wife? Even more perplexingly, how did her husband (presumably) not only construct such a well-adorned abode to her scale, but also place her inside of it while she slept obliviously? The second question is a bit of a head-scratcher, but the answer to the first is hinted at by a shot of him in a laboratory, wearing a protective plastic mask. This clip is shown right after Lindy demands (using a megaphone to talk to her enormous husband): “Make me big again.” The obstacle to her getting her wish is indicated when we see an ear of corn exploding in the lab upon being de-shrunk.

Whatever his scientific training, it’s apparent that Les isn’t able to assure Lindy that she won’t remain the miniature wife forever. He tries to console her with the suggestions that “You’ll be safe in the dollhouse” and “This is kinda nice.” Both notions fall very flat when we see her nearly run over by a robotic vacuum cleaner after falling out of her dollhouse to the floor below. Incidentally, the scale of her amenities in the dollhouse is inconsistent: the house contains an appropriately tiny table that at one point holds what looks like a small Thanksgiving dinner (turkey, mashed potatoes, vegetables), but in another clip, we see her eating a candy bar that’s half as big as she is.

Worth Watching?

This discrepancy may or may not be addressed in the series, and in any case, one doesn’t demand a heavy emphasis on logic from a story about a shrunken wife. You will likely watch “The Miniature Wife” hoping for comedy gold, and Banks is a superb comedic actor. Moreover, as she demonstrated to great effect in her supporting role in the “Hunger Games” quadrilogy, she excels at shifting between comic relief and moments of touching emotion. The teaser eschews the latter, selling us solely on the absurdist humor of “The Miniature Wife”‘s premise, but the video’s description does call the series a “dramedy.”

For his part, Macfadyen is no stranger to romance (“Pride & Prejudice,” “Anna Karenina“), drama (“Criminal Justice,” “Frost/Nixon”), comedy (“Death at a Funeral”), or dramedy (“Succession,” “Stonehouse”). Based on the 25-second teaser alone, it’s hard to gauge the chemistry between him and Banks, but the effects used to render them so disparate in size are seamless, as are their line deliveries. (If the former meant that they weren’t able to act off of each other for their scenes, you’d never know it from the latter).

All in all, the teaser for “The Miniature Wife” promises a series that will be supremely silly. This is not to say that the series’s absurdism will overwhelm its dramatic potential, especially in the hands of its two very distinguished leads. We must wait until April 9 to find out whether “The Miniature Wife” will indeed be a brilliantly funny and pointed exploration of a marriage under a very bizarre strain.