• by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, Yesterday

A Peacock series about a woman whose husband accidentally shrinks her to the size of a mouse was one of the two most bizarre concepts announced at the Upfronts last week.

The other one was a Fox drama about an assassin with Alzheimer’s. Who did I just kill yesterday? I can’t remember! 

Peacock’s show about an incredible shrinking woman sounds so ridiculous that it is like something out of the 1960s, which happened to be the silliest decade in TV history.

The decade of “The Munsters” and “Mister Ed” even had a fanciful series about little people among giants, “Land of The Giants” (1967-70). 

And now the 2020s are getting one too -- “The Miniature Wife,” starring Elizabeth Banks as the little woman and Matthew Macfayden (photos above) as the absent-minded husband who shrinks his wife with an invention he has not yet perfected.

The series was announced last week at NBCUniversal’s Upfront at Radio City Music Hall. A trailer was shown in which the accidental shrinking takes place, and then mini-Elizabeth understandably berates her husband.

“ ‘The Miniature Wife’ is a high-concept marital dramedy examining the power (im)balances between spouses Lindy (Banks) and Les (Macfayden), who battle each other for supremacy after a technological accident induces the ultimate relationship crisis,” said a description from NBCU.

A “relationship crisis”? Ya think? I also loved the application of the term “high concept” to describe this show. The inevitable thing to write here is: “High? Probably.

In any case, “Honey, I Shrunk You” could have been the title of this show, but that IP is probably controlled by whomever owns “Honey, I Shrunk The Kids” and “Honey, We Shrunk Ourselves” (movies from 1989 and 1997, respectively).

Meanwhile, Fox’s “Memory of a Killer” will have Patrick Dempsey playing the title role of a hitman who is diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s.

The show is so complicated that a description from Fox in an Upfront press release runs to 330 words, which is about half the average length of one of these TV Blogs.

To summarize: A hitman named Angelo with early-onset Alzheimer’s, who is also a photocopier salesman and dad in upstate New York, learns that the death of his wife may have been murder, and now he must protect his pregnant daughter, whose life is being threatened.

“Angelo must stop whoever’s coming for his family by searching his past hits for clues, and the list is very long,” says Fox. 

“Now Angelo must hunt down his mortal enemy while continuing to carry out hits without giving away his diagnosis and still making it home in time to cook dinner for his daughter.”

This is a lot for anyone to handle, much less a father/photocopier salesman/hitman with early-onset Alzheimer’s. 

In his annual monologue at the Disney Upfront last Tuesday, Jimmy Kimmel put this Alzheimer’s hitman show in perspective.

“Fox has a new show called ‘Memory of a Killer’,” Kimmel said. “This one is about a hitman with Alzheimer’s, which sounds bad, but it’s actually very sad. He keeps killing the same guy over and over again!”