The Cutprice Guignol

When it comes to writing about Mike Flangan’s Netflix productions, I usually deep-dive into a certain theme or aspect of the series I found interesting. Because when it comes to critiques, I really don’t have any; from The Haunting of Hill House onwards, I have adored everything he’s put out pretty much top to bottom. I never bothered reviewing these series from a critical perspective because it would just be a stack of great, big, gushing adulation, and I get enough of that from my Flangan-fanatic (Flanatic?) partner as it is.

And I thought it would be the same story with his latest, The Fall of the House of Usher; a sort-of anthology, sort-of single story that adapts a stack of Edgar Allan Poe’s stories, starring Bruce Greenwood as the man at the head of the titular house, Roderick Usher. But I have to be honest: this is the first of Mike Flanagan’s TV shows I’ve had some seriously mixed feelings about, so I’m taking a little blogging time to talk about it.

Overall, and to be entirely fair, I did enjoy House of Usher. Flanagan and his collaborators have such an incredible eye for horror, and the mix of crumbling gothic dustiness and outright gory gross-out-ery matched beautifully; it reminded me a lot of a very polished version of Slasher’s Flesh & Blood season, which I would recommend to anyone who enjoys this kind of murderous family drama. Generally, the lighter and less enormously traumatic tone was a welcome change, and getting to see a lot of the returning cast have fun in sillier, more darkly comic roles was a lot of fun (Henry Thomas having a cocaine-fuelled breakdown at his home bowling alley in the background of the season was one of my highlights). Bruce Greenwood and Mary McConnell as the Usher siblings were probably some of the best performances of the year so far, and Mark Hamill was a really surprising treat in a more restrained role. Though no TV show can hope to beat The Simpsons’ adaptation of Poe’s work, The Telltale Heart episode was an outstandingly inventive and effective take on the story, and I urgently need someone to put me in touch with whoever did T’Nia Miller’s wardrobe this season because damn.

But this was the first of Flanagan’s shows I’ve watched where I felt like pieces were really missing. A huge part of the plot revolves around the Usher’s production of an addictive painkiller Ligadone and it’s catastrophic impact on the world at large; we’re told of hundreds of thousands of deaths, addictions, and life-ruining interactions with the drug, with one of the climactic moments of the series seeing Roderick witnessing the enormity of the damage he’s caused in the form of bodies tumbling from the sky. But we don’t ever…see the actual impact of this drug on the people it’s devastated? There’s a lot of talk of the opiod crisis, of how Ligadone has fed into it but the show never really bothers to give us a look at what it’s like for people addicted to the drug or even impacted by addicts in their life. I get it, much of Usher is dedicated to the insulation the family has from it’s actions, but I think insulating as an audience from it too was the wrong choice. I assumed that Roderick’s wife, Juno, and her struggle with addiction would be the way we got into this plot, but instead, her experiences are referenced off-screen and we never get a real, raw look at what this drug is doing to the world.

And maybe that aspect was cut because there’s just so much going on in this season that it sometimes struggles with pacing. The first couple of episodes, especially, are downright chaotic in their execution, as we bounce around between timelines and flashbacks and backstories to get everything set up for the slaughter to begin. The show figures out how to balance all of this better as it goes on, but it takes a while to find it’s feet with so many characters and timelines clambering all over each other.

And this isn’t necessarily a criticism of the show, exactly, but rather of the TV landscape it’s come out into – but I am getting really bored with these stories of the debauchery of the rich and the hollowness of their seemingly-charmed lives. I feel like it’s been done to death at this point, and unless you’re going to bring something really interesting to the table (which Usher does in later episodes, particularly the aforementioned The Telltale Heart and Goldbug), it just doesn’t warrant the screentime for me. It’s especially problematic for me in the episodes centred on Perry (Sauriyan Sapkota) and Leo (Rahul Kohli) – I get what the show is going for in it’s critique of these cold, cruel, drug-addled young men, but it feels really hollow for what I’ve come to expect from Mike Flanagan’s work. Perhaps it’s because these characters only get one featured episode apiece, victims of the show’s set-up, but neither the performances nor the writing exactly elevated these tropey characters into anything genuinely compelling.

(and this is a small side note I have as a bisexual person: I really didn’t care for the depiction of bisexuality in this show. Three of the doomed Usher children are shown to have sexual interactions with people of multiple genders, and it’s framed in all three cases as an extension of a hedonistic, self-centred, and even adulterous lifestyle. I’m just really tired of seeing bisexuality framed in this way, and it’s extra-disappointing for a creator who’s included such excellent LGBTQ representations in his shows depict bisexuality in this manner)

Overall, I think The Fall of the House of Usher is a pretty good show – but I’ve come to expect such brilliance from Mike Flanagan and his work that pretty good feels like a let-down. What did you think of this season? How does it compare to his other work for you? I would love to hear in the comments below!

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(header image via IGN)