TV Talk: Netflix’s ‘Fall of the House of Usher’ offers well-defined characters meeting predictable deaths

Trib Total Media TV writer Rob Owen offers a viewing tip for the coming week.

The Flanaganverse — spooky limited series from writer Mike Flanagan including “The Haunting of Hill House,” “The Haunting of Bly Manor,” “Midnight Mass” (and, if we must count it, the lesser, teen-focused, canceled-after-one-season “The Midnight Club”) — comes to an end on Netflix with “The Fall of the House of Usher,” based on Edgar Allan Poe stories. (Flanagan will continue to make TV but he has a new deal with Amazon’s Prime Video.)

This anticipated eight-episode limited series, streaming Thursday, features the same sense of doom and dread viewers expect from Flanagan’s shows — with many of the same cast members returning — but “Usher” seems more pat and predictable, though there are a few good jump scares. Perhaps it’s the result of Poe’s works being more firmly in viewers’ consciousness than Henry James (“Bly Manor”) or Shirley Jackson (“Hill House”).

In “Usher,” Flanagan takes inspiration from the Sackler family, previously blamed for the opioid epidemic in streaming series “Dopesick” and “Painkiller,” and they’re once again effective villains as the title family in “Usher,” only this time they’re fictionalized. The Ushers have killed millions who got hooked on their opioid pain medicine, the fictional Ligadone (clearly a stand-in for OxyContin), produced by the Ushers’ Fortunato Pharmaceuticals.

At the outset, viewers learn all the children of Roderick Usher (Bruce Greenwood in the present, Zach Gilford in flashbacks) are dead. Roderick recounts the demise of each adult child in subsequent episodes, sharing the details with a Javert-like prosecutor, August Dupin (Carl Lumbly, Malcolm Goodwin in flashbacks), who’s been trying to bring down the Ushers for decades.

The Usher kids are all pieces of work in unique ways.

Frederick — AKA Frauderick (Henry Thomas, “Hill House”) — is as insecure as they come. Tamerlane (Samantha Sloyan, “Midnight Mass”) outsources intimacy by watching her husband have sex with prostitutes. Victorine (T’Nia Miller, “Bly Manor”) is willing to cut corners in the development of an artificial heart. Napoleon “Leo” Usher (Rahul Kohli, “Bly Manor”) has a nasty drug habit. Camille (Kate Siegel, “Hill House”) runs a PR firm that specializes in covering up the Ushers’ misdeeds. Prospero “Perry” Usher (Saurivan Sapkota, “Midnight Club”) is a dim bulb more interested in style than substance.

Mary McDonnell (“Battlestar Galactica”) plays Roderick’s imperious sister, Madeline, and kudos to Willa Fitzgerald who plays young Madeline and perfectly performs the same speaking cadence as McDonnell. A grizzled Mark Hamill (“Star Wars”) stars as Arthur Pym, the Ushers’ pugnacious attorney.

Flanagan regular Carla Gugino (“Hill House”) has a mysterious role as a shape-shifting woman Roderick and Madeline first meet on New Year’s Eve 1980. Gugino’s character appears to factor in the deaths of all of Roderick’s children.

“Usher” starts quicker than “Midnight Mass,” which, while thoughtful, was often verbose and rambling. But if “Usher” pulls viewers in with its more colorful characters, the series proves less engrossing as it goes along whereas “Midnight Mass” got better and better with each episode.

Perhaps the downside of the “Usher” framework — learning all the kids have died at the start and then walking back through how they each died episode by episode — is that it saps the story of the ability to surprise, especially when some of the deaths are telegraphed well in advance. Fans of Poe’s oeuvre will also find spoilers in the show’s episode titles (including “Masque of the Red Death,” “The Pit and the Pendulum,” “The Tell-Tale Heart”).

Perhaps even more so than in past Flanagan series, “Usher” saves almost all its big revelations, emotionality and its most biting humor for its last episode — which explains all that’s come before as the pieces fall into place as surely as the house of Usher must also fall, given the show’s title. It’s a satisfying ending, even if the series as a whole doesn’t quite live up to Flanagan’s previous, better efforts.