“The Fall of the House of Usher” review: “Succession” meets Edgar Allan Poe fan fiction

The opioid crisis — and the family that helped birth it — has inspired a number of books, documentaries, and TV shows, many of which aim to highlight the suffering caused by Purdue Pharma's criminally reckless marketing and promotion of OxyContin. In Netflix's The Fall of the House of Usher, however, Haunting honcho Mike Flanagan uses the works of Edgar Allen Poe to explore how moral and physical rot consumes the all-powerful (and fictional) family behind a sinister drug empire. Like Succession reinterpreted by the world's foremost author of Poe fan fiction, Usher is a Gothic-tinged horror lark that's more superficial than Flanagan's previous work but still delivers some creepy chills.

Eike Schroter/Netflix Carl Lumbly and Bruce Greenwood in 'The Fall of the House of Usher'

Fortunato Pharmaceuticals CEO Roderick Usher (Bruce Greenwood) has six children (by five different mothers), and when Usher begins, all of them are dead. The series is told in flashback, as a broken and ailing Roderick delivers his "confession" to Auguste Dupin (Carl Lumbly), a federal prosecutor who has been trying unsuccessfully for decades to bring down the Usher family's corrupt drug company. As a violent storm lashes the night outside, the two longtime enemies face off inside the dilapidated remains of the home where Usher and his brilliant sister, Madeline (Mary McDonnell), spent much of their very unhappy childhood. Over the course of eight hour-long episodes, Roderick eventually reveals the true reason his children met their ends — as visions of their mutilated corpses appear to torment him without warning.

Usher is packed with clever Poe Easter eggs. Roderick's children — incompetent eldest child Frederick (Henry Thomas), icy wellness entrepreneur Tamerlane (Samantha Sloyan), shamelessly ambitious medical engineer Victorine (T'Nia Miller), drug-addled man about town Napoleon (Rahul Kohli), ruthless family publicist Camille (Kate Siegel), and hedonistic youngest child Prospero (Sauriyan Sapkota) — share their names with notable Poe characters. Two other key players, cruel Fortunato execs Mr. Longfellow (Robert Longstreet) and Rufus Griswold (Michael Trucco), are named after poets Poe had personal beef with. And Madeline's lifelong quest to develop an AI algorithm that would bring users "virtual immortality" echoes Poe's obsession with (and fear of) death.

Eike Schroter/Netflix Paola Nuñez, T'Nia Miller, Kyliegh Curran, Crystal Balint, Henry Thomas, Bruce Greenwood, Samantha Sloyan, and Matt Biedel in 'The Fall of the House of Usher'

In his most famous short stories and poems, Poe wrote of people being brought down by greed and paranoia, addiction and violence, sometimes a senseless need for revenge. The Usher family is beset with each of these maladies, though their chief desire is to secure a life of complete comfort, which they do by amassing a fortune built on the pain of others. Young Madeline (Willa Fitzgerald) and Roderick (Zach Gilford) are launched on their path of moral decay by Verna (Carla Gugino), a mysterious demon who has built a successful career out of entrapping human "clients" by catering to — and then punishing them for — their inherent selfishness.

The poison apples don't fall far from the tree, and one by one Roderick's adult children destroy themselves in the name of avarice and glory. The Ushers and those in their orbit succumb to agonizing fates featuring many of Poe's greatest hits: Madness, mania, paralysis, and of course, premature burial. Each of Roderick's offspring gets a showcase episode that culminates in a grimly creative set-piece death — which is kinda fun, but it also, unfortunately, takes the place of true character development.

Eike Schroter/Netflix Mary McConnell and Mark Hamill in 'The Fall of the House of Usher'

Fewer kids (and fewer scenes devoted to characters quoting Poe's verse) would have allowed for more time spent establishing who the children were as people, making their downfalls more poetic. Instead, they are all various shades of "good riddance" awful. The series spends the most time with Frederick, dubbed "Froderick" by his scornful siblings who dismiss him as a joke and daddy's number one suck-up. Thomas is wonderfully entertaining as the jittery, hapless Usher heir whose creeping suspicions about his wife (Crystal Balint) lead him to exact horribly unjustified and macabre revenge.

The cast, many of them members of Flanagan's Netflix repertoire, is dependably strong. Trucco brings a sleazy menace to Rufus, an arrogant boor who underestimates how far Madeline and Roderick will go to usurp him. Mark Hamill infuses Arthur Pym, the family's ruthless and unflappable attorney/fixer, with unexpected empathy, and Gugino delivers many a masterful monologue as Verna, who excoriates the various victims in her smooth and silky whisper. (Alas, her showdown with Madeline, an impeccably frosty and formidable force in McConnell's hands, is far too brief.)

The strong performances help sustain Usher in its sloggier stretches, though I still maintain that all streaming series should decide how many episodes they'll need per season and then subtract at least one. Flanagan's latest may not be his best (I'll save that spot for Midnight Mass), but it did give me an actual nightmare, one in which I was keeping my brother's severed head in a cardboard box — very much against his will, I should add. Poe would almost certainly approve. Grade: B

The Fall of the House of Usher premieres Thursday, Oct. 12 on Netflix.

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