‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ Episode 1 Recap: Just Say Poe

Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher is a story of maximalist minimalism. Despite the sensation of teeming overripeness that Poe’s prodigious powers of observation and description create, the story features a total of three characters in a single setting. It’s a carefully observed account of the moment intrafamilial madness can no longer be kept buried, Freud’s return of the repressed made literal. Adding more characters to the triad — enmeshed brother and sister, horrified observer — would shatter the claustrophobia that makes you feel as if the walls of the titular structure were falling in on you, too.

Whether to his credit or his blame is hard to say, but Mike Flanagan took a look at the Poe story from which he lifted the title of his latest Netflix horror show and said “Fuck all that.” In a sense, that’s too bad. I really would have liked to see a Flanagan show even more pared back than what we’ve already seen from his stories of cursed mansions and islands and hotels — a real three-hander, depriving him of his ensemble-filmmaking fallback mode and forcing him to dig deep into Poe’s neurosis. He’s done this with Stephen King and Gerald’s Game, but Poe’s high gothic world would be a fascinating challenge.

What we get instead in “A Midnight Dreary,” the series premiere, is not that at all. Rather, it’s a cross between a couple of familiar TV storytelling techniques. In terms of Poe, it’s not an adaptation of Usher so much as a wide-ranging riff on tons of Poe concepts, characters, and random names thrown in as Easter eggs — a sort of “songs in the key of Poe,” a la what Noah Hawley does with the Coen Brothers’ filmography each season of Fargo. 

Storywise, this isn’t a tale of emotionally incestuous aristocrats and their final, fatal attempt at separation. It’s a satire of the ultra-wealthy, in the vein of…well, you name it: Succession, The White Lotus, Knives Out/Glass Onion, The Menu, even bits of Prime Video’s recent, excellent reimagining of Dead Ringers. In that last show, a family of monstrous pharmaceutical heirs dominates a couple of key episodes as antagonists; here, they’re the main characters, and the murder victims.

When the action begins, pharma magnate Roderick Strong (Bruce Greenwood) and his estranged sister Madeline (Mary McDonnell) are burying who we learn are the last three of his six children. The whole half dozen were still alive and well just two weeks prior, when the government launched its trial of the family for the role their company, Fortunato Pharmaceuticals, played in the opioid epidemic. On a dark and stormy night after the funeral, Roderick summons U.S. Attorney C. Auguste Dupin (Carl Lumbly) to his crumbling childhood home. His plan is to confess “everything.”

Roderick and Madeline get the names of the main characters from the original “Usher,” but their mother Eliza (Annabeth Gish) gets the key part of its story. After she dies due to a religiously motivated refusal to see a doctor or take medicine, Roderick and Madeline bury her in the backyard so as to avoid having her body medically examined and embalmed against her wishes. But on, you guessed it, a dark and stormy night, she crawls out of the ground, marches over to the mansion of her former boss and “lover” Mr. Longfellow (Robert Longstreet), and chokes him to death in full view of Roderick (Graham Verchere) and Madeline (Lulu Wilson), who are likely his biological children. She then collapses and dies herself, and the whole thing gets swept under the rug.

Years later, on New Year’s Eve 1979, Roderick (Zach Gilford) and Madeline (Willa Fitzgerald) have grown into glamorous, politically conservative New York City socialites, dressing up as Jay and Daisy from The Great Gatsby. (Paging Dr. Freud again!) They’ve apparently committed some kind of crime that night, and they encounter a supernatural bartender named Verna (Carla Gugino) who tells them they’ve stepped out of space and time and that everything’s about to change for them.

And at the trial, Dupin lets slip in his opening argument that he has an informant within the family, leading Roderick to arrange a family dinner and a $50 million bounty for whoever ferrets out the rat. The gathered Ushers and spouses/significant others include: Roderick and Madeline; Arthur Pym (Mark Hamill), their odious attorney and fixer; Frederick/Freddie (Henry Thomas), Roderick’s lightweight eldest son, his vapid illusion-cake-baking wife Morelle (Crystal Balint), and their thoughtful daughter Lenore (Kyleigh Curran); Tamerlane/Tammy Usher (Samantha Sloyan), Roderick’s eldest daughter, who’s prepping for the launch of something called Goldbug alongside her fitness guru husband, “BillT” (Matt Biedel); Victorine (T’Nia Miller), Roderick’s eldest illegitimate kid, a heart surgeon who attends with her girlfriend and colleague Alessandra/Al (Paola Nuñez); Napoleon (Rahul Kohli), who’s famous for something or other and who attends without the live-in boyfriend who nearly catches him cheating with some lady while playing Mortal Kombat; Camille (Kate Siegel), head of PR for her dad’s company and a very Emma Frost/Cruella DeVille sort; Prospero/Perry (Sauriyan Sapkota), a young wannabe nightclub impresario everyone else suspects of being the informant; and Juno (Ruth Codd), Roderick’s much younger, very Irish, goth-adjacent new wife, whom all the kids resent.

Anyway, something supernatural appears to be going on on top of it all. Eliza’s ghost clearly appears behind Dupin in the Usher home when Roderick says she’s standing there, an assertion Dupin dismisses as a cheap ploy to throw him off his game. Verna appears in creepy form — with blacked-out eyeballs, wearing a raven mask — at various times. A spooky jester appears in Roderick’s limo, causing him to collapse with a nosebleed and stare into the eyes of a raven. Verna’s entire bar back in 1980 is heavily implied to be a ghostly illusion or a pocket dimension or a portal to hell or what have you. 

My first rule of thumb for horror television shows is always this: Is it scary? Is it effective at doing the thing the genre is supposed to do, i.e. freak you out, in the same way comedies are supposed to make you laugh? By that score, Usher’s a failure. Brief semi-subliminal flashes of people making scary smiles with unusual lighting, a shadow in a fire-lit sitting room, Carla Gugino showing up out of nowhere: none of this is frightening. (Carla Gugino showing up out of nowhere actually sounds pretty nice!)

Flanagan’s writing is, generously, inconsistent. He shows a big banner reading “HAPPY NEW YEAR 1980,” then throws “DECEMBER 31, 1979” in big titles on the screen just in case you couldn’t put two and two together. He makes Camille — played by his own wife, for god’s sake — say “Just threw up in my mouth a little bit” in a television show in 2023. Epic bacon, man.

But at other times I found it tight and witty. I really enjoyed the way the doofusy Freddie would cuss, then apologize to his daughter for it, then continue cussing. Napoleon got some good dunks in on the Instagram-trendy illusion cake, and the bit where we discover he’s getting blown while gaming and talking to his boyfriend on the phone made me chuckle. Perry’s pitch for his exclusivity-driven nightclub empire is seedy in a way that feels reflective of how people like him think: “It’s where the movie starlet everybody worships is busy giving head to the real VIPs in the corner.” Tammy and BillT casually discuss having to cancel a sex worker that evening like they’d talk about picking up dry cleaning. Flanagan’s lapsed-Catholic hostility towards religion, my favorite aspect of his work, pops up when Eliza tells an injured Roderick, per Mother Theresa, that “pain and suffering are like the kiss of Jesus.” Isn’t that reassuring?

I can think of worse ways to spend a few nighttime hours this month than in the company of these rich assholes as they slowly destroy each other in a creepy mansion, while Mike Flanagan’s script introduces a patent attorney named Ligeia, or reveals that the artificial heart Victorine implanted in that monkey has the brand name Tell-Tale, or turns the monkey into a murderer on the rooftops of Paris, or whatever. At the very least, the element of satire should cancel out his more maudlin tendencies. (“Whatever walked there, walked together,” anyone?) Flanagan feels about as convincingly Poe-ish as B-movie legend Roger Corman did back in the day when he loosely adapted the bard of Baltimore’s work. But if we’re having some spooky fun, so what?

This piece was written during the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike, after the victory of the WGA in their own strike over similar issues. Without the labor of the actors currently on strike, the show being covered here wouldn’t exist.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.