Just finished watching the eight-episode miniseries The Fall of the House of Usher from Mike Flanagan, creator of other popular horror-themed television shows such as The Haunting of Hill House and Midnight Mass. Here are my thoughts on it.
As an interconnected piece of an overarching frame story on the fate of the titular Ushers as a whole (an extremely affluent, powerful, corrupt, and complicated American crime family), most episodes deal in the individual tragedy of a particular member of that family, each of those episodes additionally loosely based on one of the many classic horror tales of Edgar Allen Poe. The setup is incredibly compelling. Pulling such a complex premise made of disparate parts into a single cohesive work takes a good deal of intelligent architecting across multiple interconnected storylines and not insignificant literary knowledge (since much of it is based around Poe’s works). And Mike Flannigan’s crew mostly succeeds in this task, but every episode does not hit to the same standard in regards to the writing.
Visually, yes, and this makes sense as Flannigan himself directed every episode. The show is extremely consistent in its visual tone: each carefully-constructed shot is exquisitely rich with dark, brooding, Gothic atmosphere or (very often and, in the hybrid sense) modern sleekness. This hybrid tone permeates. In fact, I feel the show is too consistent, and ultimately stiff, when it comes to its horror elements. Most scares–and there are jump scares–are rendered relatively ineffective. Horror elements especially repetitious in pattern even begin to come across somewhat lazy as the episodes go on, not emotionally matching the dramatic sound cues accompanying. But consistent, and consistently high quality, the visual production (and sound design, I might add) certainly is.
The writing, again, not so much. None of it is terrible, although sometimes you can feel the voice of a single writer in dialogues rather than conversations feeling as different characters are speaking to one another each from their own head-spaces. This is exceedingly common in movies and TV, especially in talky scenes lacking any action. Drives me up a wall when I am presented a collection of characters merely cliches/stereotypes, that then all speak and act quickly and together as though driven by a singular motor toward the one purpose the writer has for this exchange of dialogue, with their individual cliche/stereotypical traits the only differentiation between the characters, like different flavor packets. Much of the writing is very good: cynically, satirically biting at various aspects of American culture and the “Elites” that run the show through all manner of malfeasance, perversion, and corruption. This is handled a bit comically heavy-handed and cliched in parts, but it’s dealt with quite similarly to Eric Kripe’s The Boys, at least somewhat self-aware of the over-exaggeration of its satire. And so it comes across, in the end, as… clever. Sometimes the writing is deathly serious, and other times–often in the same scene–supremely goofy. And all of this works quite well to keep things on the whole fairly engaging.
But, because you can put together very early on during an episode, how it is going to fall neatly into place within the established pattern of how each of this show’s episodes go… and never do any surprise… a lot of interesting potential, especially in regards to mystery, is squandered. Each episode becomes solely about how interesting the characters and dialogue is in going through the same tragic, downward spiral motions; how hard the important bits hit; and whether it drags or not. And some episodes are just weaker than others in all these regards. Final nitpick: there’s some serious believability lapses in the behavior of a few characters as the series progresses. A decent mix of careful nuance and hamfisted heavy-handedness, the writing driving the story is of high caliber but not without significant flaw, which is common in television with many writers, but even in overall conception in regards to the repetitive episode framework.
Speaking of mystery, therein lies the show’s biggest flaw in my eyes. A certain degree of predictability might be expected, seeing as the show is primarily based around well-known works of the 19th Century, but even when the show is trying to be mysterious, nothing in even a single episode, even when fully dressed by stingers and all to support, comes as a surprise. Sure, the title of the show kind of gives it away, and from the start it’s mostly told in flashback so the audience is asking, “How did we get here?” But, as an example, there’s one major twist in the whooole shebang, and they spoil this by revealing beforehand the character is going to do it.
All in all, The Fall of the House of Usher is well worth your time, especially if you think you’d dig a brooding drama about the rich and powerful becoming systematically undone that culminates time-and-time again in a myriad of outlandishly horrific ways.
