• by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, February 9, 2026

It was the kookiest TV show concept of last spring’s Upfronts and now, “The Miniature Wife” has a premiere date.

This means that this show, about a hapless husband who accidentally shrinks his wife with a hare-brained invention gone awry, is actually happening.

This was something the TV Blog had some doubts about when the show was announced at the NBCU Upfront last May.

But now, the TV Blog has been proven wrong (and not for the first time either). “The Miniature Wife” is now set to premiere April 9 on Peacock, the company announced last week.

Why doubt that this show would ever be made? Because there have been instances in my personal history of covering Upfronts for many years in which shows were announced with great fanfare and then never saw the light of day.

“The Miniature Wife” simply sounded like a concept that was just too weird to ever come together.

The show stars Elizabeth Banks as the incredible shrinking woman and Matthew Macfadyen as the hubby who shrunk her. 

The show conjures memories of the 1960s series “Land of the Giants,” which was about a group of space-traveling earthlings who become marooned on a distant planet on which everything, including the planet’s human-like inhabitants, was 12 times the size of the stranded visitors from Earth. 

More recently, “The Miniature Wife” seems like it was inspired by the movies “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids” (1989) and its two sequels “Honey, I Blew Up the Kid” (1992) and “Honey, We Shrunk Ourselves” (1997).

Please note: “Blowing up” the kid meant the child was enlarged, not blown to smithereens with explosives.

A “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids” TV show was also attempted in the late ’90s and in recent years, there has been talk of a “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids” movie remake, but Google says that idea has been shelved indefinitely.

In all of them, the plot involves a struggling inventor who produces a machine that shrinks stuff.

Unfortunately, he shrunk the kids. The original movie is said to have grossed $222 million for Disney.

Despite the similarities, none of these titles are referenced as inspirations for “The Miniature Wife” in the Peacock publicity material for the show.

Instead, the basis for “The Miniature Wife,” according to NBCU, is a short story of the same title by Manuel Gonzales. 

The story is from his first book, a collection of 18 short stories. The collection, also titled “The Miniature Wife,” was published in 2013. 

“It’s easy to compare Manuel Gonzales to George Saunders, but it would be just as easy to compare him to [Jorge Luis] Borges or [Gabriel García] Márquez or Aimee Bender,” raved a critic for Esquire about “The Miniature Wife.” 

Full disclosure: I do not know who George Saunders or Aimee Bender are. But the bigger question for me is: How will this evidently literary work about a man who shrinks his wife -- and the marital turmoil it creates -- work as a TV sitcom?

" '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,” says the Peacock press material. 

Want to see how times have changed? Compare the above 32-word statement from Peacock to the nine-word tagline Disney used to promote “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids” in 1989: “The most astonishing innovative backyard adventure of all time!”

If given the choice, which one would you watch?