The new show The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window attempts to cover so many genre types that it has a serious tone problem.

Kristen Bell stars as the unreliable narrator in the half-hour comedy-drama-romance-mystery-farce that is at times funny, serious, sad, silly and maddening. Bell is Anna, a day-drinking, night-drinking, casserole-baking, bathrobe-wearing woman who spends her time looking out her window, jumbo-sized glass of wine in hand. She sees someone, specifically a handsome widower and his young daughter, moving into the house across the street.

Anna makes an overture of friendship to her new neighbors, Neil (Tom Riley) and Emma (Samsara Yett), bringing over a chicken casserole. But on her way to meet drop off the dish, it starts raining. The rain triggers Anna’s anxieties and she faints dead away, and the casserole crashes to the ground. Neil spies Anna and comes to her rescue.

Back and Anna’s house, the two share a moment where Anna reveals that she is grieving just like Neil, as her daughter died three years earlier. Soon, Neil and Anna and Emma are having dinner together, and it seems like things are getting romantic. (Anna’s husband divorced her after their daughter’s death.) The next day, however, Anna runs into Lisa (Shelley Hennig), Neil’s live-in girlfriend, home from her flight attendant job.

Lisa and Anna don’t hit it off, to be sure, but then Anna doesn’t seem to get along with anybody, including the neighbors, her therapist, her ex and even her best friend, Sloane (Mary Holland), who keeps trying to get Anna to start painting again to get her out of her alcohol-fueled depressed.

Anna, at her perpetual post watching the Neil’s house from her living room window, wine in hand, sees something sinister: Lisa, her throat bleeding from a stab wound, collapsing to the floor. But did she really see that? After she summons the police, Anna is surprised to find that they found nothing amiss at Neil’s house, and that Lisa is working on a flight to Seattle.

Neil tries to forgive Anna’s mistake, but after Anna decides she can’t let this go; she’s going to investigate. She begins by breaking into Neil’s house, and predictably, he catches her and blows his stack. Though he forbids Anna from contacting Emma, the two meet briefly and after interrogating the child, Anna learns that Neil and Lisa were arguing before the (alleged) stabbing, and that there’s reason to suspect that Emma’s mother may have died by Neil’s hand.

While Woman plays as a straightforward drama around 80% of the time, it veers into the strange and absurd at times: the backstory of how Anna’s daughter died is gruesome, but the circumstances are so ridiculous that it forces a laugh. Anna has a handyman, Buell, (Cameron Britton) who spends his day tinkering with her mailbox, trying to reattach the door. And every time Anna visits her daughter’s gravestone, the inscription on it changes.

At other times the show feels like a sitcom, then a crime drama, and then again it smacks of the genre it is parodying: the female-led thrillers about the unstable woman who tries to report a crime only to be mocked and disbelieved because of her addiction problems. (Think The Woman in the Window or The Girl on the Train.) Anna’s straight-faced narration only serves to highlight the contrast in how unserious the show is about the dangerous game Anna is playing. The tone is so uneven that it’s hard to know how to feel about the show when it doesn’t know how it feels about itself.

The performances are good and the pacing of the story is good through its eight briskly-paced episodes. But viewers looking for a straight-up spoof of the Drunk Girl genre may find themselves feeling unfulfilled.