Fall House of Usher - finally finished, good throughout .. maybe 3.75/5?
I've been re-watching all of Mike Flanagan's Netflix shows in order: The Haunting of Hill House, The Haunting of Bly Manor, Midnight Mass, The Midnight Club, and Fall of the House of Usher. I'm only halfway through my re-watch of Usher right now, but most of it is coming back to me.
If you enjoyed Usher, but haven't seen Midnight Mass (2021), I can't recommend it enough. It's easily my favorite of his Netflix shows. For me, it registered as much more thematically/philosophically deeper, coherent, and polished than the rest of the shows. So I wasn't surprised to find out that, of his five shows, it's 1) the only one that is an original story instead of being an adaptation (or a "loosely based on/inspired by Jackson/James/Pike/Poe" project), and 2) it was the show he was the most involved in (he wrote, directed, edited, and produced all seven episodes, and has described it as a very personal passion project regarding his religious upbringing).
My only real knocks against MM are that 1) it really belly-flops the ending. (To be fair, I think all of his shows have pretty bad endings, usually involving heavy-handed monologues that try and fail to tie everything together in a pretty bow.) And 2) I'm sorry, but IMO Kate Segal (Flanagan's wife, who stars in most of his projects) is... awful. Like, usually the worst part of each show. (She's pretty good in her limited role in Usher, though.) Maybe she's just a bad actress, or maybe she just *seems* like a bad actress when she shares the screen with more talented/charismatic people, or maybe her characters are just poorly written--and for some reason get the worst dialogue in each of Flanagan's shows. (Then again, who am I to judge? I'm not an actor!) But, for me, MM's belly-flop ending was largely tied to what I thought was a particularly bad final monologue delivered by Segal (which was a revisiting of a particularly bad monologue she had delivered in a previous episode).
Anyway, my final ranking:
1) Midnight Mass
2) Usher (I'm still finishing my re-watch, but it feels much tighter than most of the earlier stuff)
2) Hill House (A great first show, but good grief that entire final episode is a stinker)
4) Midnight Club (It's fun, despite the awkward structure. But YMMV depending on your tolerance for Young Adult stories/characters/tropes)
The Most Distant 5) Bly Manor (No. NO NO NO. A good first episode and setup, but it was so all over the place. I was not surprised when I read that Flanagan was least involved with this one, having only directed/written one of the nine episodes.)
www.forbes.com
