*major spoilers ahoy*

The Netflix TV show by Mike Flanagan presents us with his worst work to date.

The Fall of The House of Usher follows the wildly rich Roderick Usher who owns Fortunato Pharmaceuticals. A company that has played a large role in the opioid crisis of this fictional world, which doesn’t at all sound like the Sackler Family and Purdue Pharma.

Given the show’s title, there are zero delusions from the beginning as to the endgame here. In fact, the story kicks off with half of Roderick’s kiddos buried six feet under while Fortunato is in the middle of a lawsuit.

Speaking of kids, all the Usher children suck and calling them a family is a stretch. Two of them (Frederick and Tamerlane) are the product of Roderick’s relationship with his One True Love, Annabel Lee, who Roderick drove to suicide. The rest are the result of various hoedowns (Prospero, Camille, Victorine, Napoleon).

Herein lies my first problem – there was too much emphasis on making the main cast as diverse as humanly possible. Consequently, there is very little sense that the Ushers are a family.

This lack of unity is intentional on part of the writers no doubt, but it made it difficult to care about their downfall. Individually, they are hedonistic and annoying, further making it difficult to care about them as people (other than generally feeling sorry that they had such a trash father). This resulted in me not caring about this show at all.

As each episode came to its gruesome conclusion, I was like another one bites the dust. Next.

Given that at most we have one episode to get to know the Ushers before they’re ghosts, it made it hard to watch each episode with anything other than anticipation for their deaths (deserved with Frederick), rather than hoping they would somehow outwit Verna, or at least earn a peaceful death (spoiler: literally none of them even manage the latter, not even the least sucky offspring – Napoleon).

Perhaps that was the writer’s intent? However, with Roderick giving us his life’s sob story, it felt like we’re meant to sympathize with him and hope there exists some way of weaseling out of Verna’s deal to spare his children.

Seeing modernized re-tellings of Poe’s stories are the selling points here, and each episode follows a different Usher’s demise and a classic Poe story. All the while Roderick, haunted by the ghosts of his children, narrates how their deaths came about to the attorney who’s suing him (Auguste) inside a lightless, run-down, decrepit windy shack.

Furthermore, Roderick’s descendants are dying because he is dying of CADASIL. Hence why he pushed Victorine to hurry up with the human heart trials presumably to save himself and consequently, his children.

Why Roderick didn’t immediately get snipped after making that deal is beyond me. Like bro, you’ve already doomed your two living children to early graves, why would you keep having kids? This simply begets common sense.

Usher does a decent job setting a creepy mood, and the re-tellings are kinda ffective (especially “The Red Mask of Death” and “The Tell-Tale Heart”). Having Roderick narrating everything while being tormented until his bitter end was neat, but I found myself wondering why Auguste would even show up what seems like an obvious ambush? In any otherstory this would be an obvious ploy to off him and he’s black. Like homie, come on. You should know better.

On a serious note, Usher could’ve been an interesting critique of Big Pharma and how our government has handled the opioid crisis, but those ideas felt flat. We even get the image of bodies falling from Roderick’s tower but like why do I care about any of these nameless, faceless people? I don’t even care about the Ushers.

The only theme that really came across well is how greed, money, and power corrupts absolutely. Roderick signed, sealed, and delivered his own descendants to Verna on a silver platter in exchange for gold and when they started dying, he was like:

Usher would’ve benefited from making the main characters slightly more nuanced. Minus Napoleon, all of them are entirely self-absorbed. The nameless victims of the opioid crisis needed faces – I thought Auguste was gonna have a big reveal talking about how badly his family or whatever had suffered because of Ligodone but alas, he seemed confused the entire time.

Even one story showing who exactly was impacted by Ligodone would’ve worked in showing how terrible the opioid crisis is and how certain pharmaceutical companies capitalized off of people’s suffering.

There existed Juno, but like she didn’t really seem to have been affected that negatively. Ligodone itself was born out of Roderick’s and Madeline’s own trauma over the suffering of their mother, not necessarily ill-intentions, so the drug itself was neutral and only made evil by their choices thereafter. Again, missed chance at some very interesting social commentary about medical advancements.

Lastly, Verna’s existence should’ve been postponed. As soon as Prospero was offed, it was obvious what was happening, the only question was why.

The Fall of the House of Usher Rating: 5.5/10