Netflix recruits Jennifer Coolidge to sell you a house (and sell you on The Watcher)

It’s taken Hollywood many years (and a stellar season of The White Lotus) to figure out this surefire formula to promote a project: if Jennifer Coolidge is in the thing, lead with that! Netflix is wisely taking advantage of the current Coolidge mania to get people excited about The Watcher—you can decide for yourself if the strategy is working.

If you’re someone who would be content watching Coolidge read the phone book, you’ll undoubtedly be pleased to watch her sell a house as Karen Calhoun of Darren Dunn Realty. No question she’s selling it: “Thanksgiving dinner, you can push this to the side and put the turkey right here,” she demonstrates in the dining room. “You know, so you’re just two feet away from any major piece of meat.”

But while the real estate agent is clearly faultless, the house itself may leave something to be desired. Highlighting the dumbwaiter, Karen ominously observes, “You could fit a person in there.” (Are your foreshadowing alarms going off?) In the “grand bedroom,” she says, “You can actually look out and see everything that’s going on in the town. But you wanna keep the curtains closed. You know, there’s a lotta weird neighbors and stuff out there, you know. You don’t want them watching you.”

And here we come to the crux of the issue. In Ryan Murphy’s new limited series—based on a true story—Dean (Bobby Cannavale) and Nora Brannock (Naomi Watts) are generally tortured by their strange, nosy neighbors, including Miss Karen herself. Things come to a head when they start receiving letters from a creepy figure called “The Watcher.” The notes “[terrorize] the Brannocks to their breaking point as the neighborhood’s sinister secrets come spilling out,” per the series’ logline.

The show’s impressive cast also includes Mia Farrow, Margo Martindale, Terry Kinney, Joe Mantello, Richard Kind, Noma Dumezweni, Christopher McDonald, Michael Nouri, Isabel Gravitt, Henry Hunter Hall, and Luke David Blumm. The series premieres on Netflix later this year—but if the streamer wanted to just give us a Jennifer Coolidge House Hunters-style show, we would happily accept that as well.