Fall of the House of Usher lets the real villains off the hook

polygon.com:

Mike Flanagan didn’t start his storytelling career on Netflix, but it is where he found his voice. Starting with The Haunting of Hill House, Flanagan has created, written, and directed increasingly personal and complicated series for the streaming service. Each show, from The Haunting of Bly Manor to Midnight Mass, is an exploration of an ensemble cast’s dark shadows through ghoulish jump scares and an endless string of monologues.

But while Flanagan has always excelled at using his characters to explore existential questions about death and faith,The Fall of the House of Usher, his latest and last series for Netflix, is his first real attempt to move beyond personal darkness and take on larger societal ills. It is his biggest, most ambitious show; it’s often even his most impressive. But it’s also far and away his worst.

[Ed. note: This story contains spoilers for The Fall of the House of Usher.]

An extremely loose adaptation of the Edgar Allan Poe short story, The Fall of the House of Usher follows the Usher family, most specifically the siblings at the head of it, Roderick (Bruce Greenwood) and Madeline (Mary McDonnell), as their family and pharmaceutical empire crumbles around them. Before their recent fall from the top, a scandal-filled week that also saw each of the family’s six heirs die tragically, the Ushers were one of the richest and most powerful families in the world, but also one of the most hated.

In typical Flanagan fashion, the story is told through a frame narrative: an aging Roderick Usher taking us through his own rise and fall, all with the death toll of about one Usher scion per episode.

If there’s one thing that Flanagan has proven in his previous four shows and two movies at Netflix (and his Doct