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GLEN WELDON, HOST:

The new Netflix horror miniseries "The Fall Of The House Of Usher" makes for a terrifically spooky October binge. It cleverly reimagines and remixes several works by Edgar Allan Poe in a modern setting. We meet doomed siblings Roderick and Madeline Usher and the dark secrets that even their unimaginable wealth and privilege can't manage to keep buried. I'm Glen Weldon, and today we're talking about "The Fall Of The House Of Usher" on POP CULTURE HAPPY HOUR from NPR.

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WELDON: Joining me today is Jordan Crucchiola. She is a writer and producer and the host of the podcast "Feeling Seen" on Maximum Fun. Hey, Jordan. Welcome back.

JORDAN CRUCCHIOLA: Hi. Thank you for having me to talk about Mike Flanagan's "Succession."

WELDON: There we go. Right. And also with us is freelance journalist Cristina Escobar. She's the co-founder and editor-in-chief of LatinaMedia.Co. Welcome back, Cristina.

CRISTINA ESCOBAR: Thank you so much for having me.

WELDON: I want to talk about this show. Let's get to it. OK. So "The Fall Of The House Of Usher" is the latest Netflix series from, as Jordan mentioned, Mike Flanagan, the guy behind "The Haunting Of Hill House," "Midnight Mass" and others. Bruce Greenwood plays Roderick Usher, head of a pharmaceutical company responsible for thousands, maybe millions, of deaths, though his wealth and power have ensured he's avoided any legal repercussions. His ruthless sister, Madeline, played by Mary McDonnell, is his partner in crime, and the two share a dark secret that begins to come to light as the series begins.

The Ushers are now the subject of a criminal case that may finally stick, this one led by longtime Usher nemesis prosecutor Auguste Dupin, played by Carl Lumbly. At the same time, the six heirs to the Usher fortune, played by several favorites from Flanagan's many other Netflix series, start suffering bizarre and horrifying consequences. The show's framing device sees Roderick sitting and drinking in the ruined house he and Madeline grew up in, unburdening his soul to a disbelieving Dupin. The series features character names and situations familiar to anyone who's ever read the poems and stories of Edgar Allan Poe - live burial, murderous primates, cursed bloodlines, the whole Bard of Baltimore schmear, really. All eight episodes of "The Fall Of The House Of Usher" are now streaming on Netflix. Jordan, kick us off. What'd you think?

CRUCCHIOLA: I am a big fan of this one.

WELDON: OK.

CRUCCHIOLA: The last time I was on to talk about Flanagan was "The Midnight Club," which was a tepid affair. And hey, guess what, guys? He's back to miniseries format.

WELDON: Sure.

CRUCCHIOLA: We're back to his adult ensemble. And he has roped in some of the young folks from "Midnight Club," who popped up a little bit in "Midnight Mass," too. There's all kinds of Flanagan Easter eggs in here. He's back together with his collaborator, longtime DP and now episode director, Mike Fimognari. So this is truly a Flana-feast (ph), and it is beautiful storybook horror. It has "Billions," "Succession"-y elements to it, and I love a bit of rich people intrigue.

WELDON: Sure.

CRUCCHIOLA: I'm two thumbs up on this one, honestly.

WELDON: OK. Rich people getting their comeuppance, also - you like to see that. Love to see it - eating the rich. OK, Cristina, what did you think?

ESCOBAR: I really liked it, too. There were some elements that really worked for me and some that didn't. I felt like the eat-the-rich piece was really good and how they modernized because it's all based off of, you know, Edgar Allan Poe's work. And so moving it forward, doing pharmaceuticals, like, there was a lot of really strong pieces in there. And it was legitimately scary.

WELDON: Sure.

ESCOBAR: Like, I was watching it while it was stormy outside my house.

WELDON: Right.

ESCOBAR: And then there was, like - I thought I was hearing things that definitely were not happening, like my kids calling me. And I was like - like, I was legitimately scared, which is fun. And there were a lot of fun literary elements, some, like, campy stuff - say, with a cat.

WELDON: Yeah.

ESCOBAR: But then there were a few choices, like Mary McDonnell's wig, that I just was like, what?

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ESCOBAR: And then some of the casting as well - you know, I always think of Zach Gilford, who plays the young Roderick, as, like, beloved "Friday Night Lights"...

WELDON: Yeah.

ESCOBAR: ...A warm character, and it was really hard to believe him going so far into the dark side. And I just felt like there were some casting decisions that maybe I would have...

WELDON: Yeah.

ESCOBAR: ...Handled a little differently.

WELDON: Oh, I hear you. I hear you. For me, though, I mean, I've said this before, but there is a term of art that we big-time professional TV critics use sometimes, and I'm going to bust it out here - hoot and a half. Man, I thought this thing was just a hoot and a half. I rolled over for it, and it rubbed my tummy. Look, real talk, Poe is one of those authors who everybody reads and loves in high school. But then you go into college, and suddenly he's not cool anymore, and you have to pretend that he wasn't your best friend in high school and you never, you know, had sleepovers at his house.

CRUCCHIOLA: (Laughter).

WELDON: And it's not fair 'cause Poe's great. I mean, he's a freak, and he could stand to get over his damn self. And people talk about the purple prose, and even that, for me - feature, not a bug.

CRUCCHIOLA: And a perfect complement to Mike Flanagan, who...

WELDON: Exactly, excess.

CRUCCHIOLA: ...Famously, that TikTok that went around where it was, hey, Mike, what do you love more - Kate Siegel or monologues? And he says, Kate, and he delivers that information via monologue.

WELDON: There you go, right? I mean, that's a - they're vibing on their excess. I mean, there is a time for minimalism, but there's also a time for phantasmagorical miasmas hanging over dark, sullen waters of a lurid (ph) tarn or whatever. This show gets that. And I love - my favorite thing is the Vitamix approach to Poe references that this thing has. If you took a shot every time some character has a Poe character name or there's a reference to a story or poem, your liver would explode, and I love that. I mean, I spent a lot of this show just kind of leaning forward going, basically, say the line, Bart, because they would go like, oh, it's called Rue Laboratories, but we call it the Rue Morgue. And I'm like, yea.

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WELDON: There it is. Part of the fun is every time you meet some new character - are they going to be named Montresor or Prosper or Tamerlane?

CRUCCHIOLA: I loved that. I loved that we had anachronistic names in a contemporary setting. I didn't get over that the entire show.

WELDON: Yeah. Did you have a favorite reference?

ESCOBAR: I really liked how, yes, some things were, like, really obvious. Like, if you want ravens, they're going to be there, right?

WELDON: Yep.

ESCOBAR: If you like "Annabel Lee," don't worry.

WELDON: There she is.

ESCOBAR: Yeah. But also, like, even - I went back and read the story "The House Of Usher" after finishing it to see, like, what was in it and what wasn't. Some stuff, yes, some stuff, no, which was really fun. But even just, like - "Gold-Bug" is a story. It's not necessarily related, but they did, like, some nice, like, pieces along the way where you might say, like, I wonder where that came from. It came from Edgar Allan Poe...

WELDON: Yeah.

ESCOBAR: ...Which is nice. Like, I think, as a project, adapting maybe less cool or general, like, white guy spooky canon stuff is a fun television project to have. You know, it's not Shakespeare. You have to do a lot of work thinking about how to adapt it and put stuff together. And that piece, that construction, was really fun to watch.

WELDON: Yeah, I dug that. I dug that. I mean, Carla Gugino plays a character called Verna, and there's no character named Verna in all of Poe. I got stuck on that for a while, and then I realized that anagrams are a thing that live in the world. And I just ate this thing up. There's a couple of funeral services in the show, and the priest reads this kind of mashup of various Poe poems. So as he's talking, you're thinking that's not the usual funeral comforting homilies. This is dark. And then it's like, oh, apparently Catholicism can get even gothier. I hadn't realized that.

Now, the one thing I will say that it took me the longest to warm up to was the modern setting. You know, I should have seen it coming 'cause that's what he did with Henry James and Shirley Jackson. But you hear "House Of Usher," and you want decaying rafters and rotting gables and swampy lakes. And what we get in this, in the first couple of episodes at least, is this weird suburban cul-de-sac that looks like a movie set. Did that work for you, the modern setting?

ESCOBAR: I liked it, yeah. It allowed them to play with the elements of Poe and take the things that are really fascinating and interesting and still compelling, but also maybe forget some of the other pieces, right? Poe perhaps had an obsession with being buried alive...

WELDON: Yeah.

ESCOBAR: ...Maybe, one might say.

WELDON: One might say.

ESCOBAR: And so that perhaps is not as common of an occurrence now that we have modern medicine.

CRUCCHIOLA: (Laughter).

ESCOBAR: But, you know, it still shows up there, and then how they handled it and the cruelty behind it or the pieces of it I thought worked. And I also - of course, when you move it up to a modern setting, it allows you to have a modern critique here of pharmaceuticals, but of other pieces...

WELDON: Yeah.

ESCOBAR: ...As well - being able to have, like, people of all sorts of races and sexualities and those pieces...

WELDON: Sure. Yeah.

ESCOBAR: ...Which I thought enriched the story. You just have to wait for your decaying mansion, gables situation 'cause they did give it to you. You just had to wait for it.

WELDON: Yeah, that's true. Jordan, what about the Sackler parallel here? Did that work for the pharmaceutical?

CRUCCHIOLA: Oh, my God. Yeah.

WELDON: This - the theme here is corporate greed - well, personal greed and corporate greed. How did it work for you?

CRUCCHIOLA: When we open up on, like, a courtroom drama in the Usher crime family and then, like, I realized what they're on trial for, I was like, oh, this is Purdue Pharma.

(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER")

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: (As character) Now, I know there have already been a lot of headlines about Fortunato Pharma, about Ligadone, about the opioid epidemic in our homes and streets, the mountain of corpses that piled up since Roderick Usher - he's sitting over there - began marketing his painkillers.

CRUCCHIOLA: This is one-to-one Purdue Pharma. This is OxyContin. That is what Ligadone is.

WELDON: Right, sure.

CRUCCHIOLA: I was kind of surprised at points at almost how ripped-from-the - like, and in a delighted way, honestly - at how ripped from the headlines it was. There were even - Kate Siegel, she plays Camille. She is one of the bastard children of the Usher family. She's not one of the original born...

WELDON: Sure.

CRUCCHIOLA: ...To Roderick and his wife, but she references something that happened, like, very recently in pop culture. And I was like, oh, my God.

WELDON: Yeah.

CRUCCHIOLA: Like, when did we shoot this compared to when did this get edited? Because this feels very current in a way that I don't think will make it feel, like, too timely when it comes out, like it'll have a sort of expiration date. It just sort of really anchors it in this time and place. I thought that worked really well - I mean, a sort of a perfect avatar for eat the rich. Like, this is, like, a deeply real eat-the-rich scenario of, like, these are the people responsible for creating a medicine and excusing away its effects and lying to you for decades and creating an opioid epidemic and sort of gleefully cashing in on that. The insertion of, like, the character of Juno, who plays Roderick's wife, who's essentially his little Ligadone living experiment and how it's an OK pill.

WELDON: Yeah. And Juno is played by Ruth Codd. Juno is, as you mentioned, Roderick Usher's new wife - brand-new wife.

CRUCCHIOLA: Like, any time you kind of think you might be coming around on someone who, like, oh, well, here's a flash of humanity in this - you see something absolutely vile that they've done again.

WELDON: Sure.

CRUCCHIOLA: I cannot go on without pointing out that this is a feast for Carla Gugino.

WELDON: Yeah.

(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER")

CARLA GUGINO: (As Verna) All that sweat, the perfumes, the lotions, the musk - sex, yes, but with a dash of Rome.

CRUCCHIOLA: Mike Flanagan loves and respects and appreciates the gifts of Carla Gugino. And the amount of different things she gets to do in this and kind of surprising things with the way some of the deaths come around and the avatar that she is for certain objects of murder is very interesting. And I just love getting to see people feast on a character on screen. And Bruce Greenwood - what an eternal hunk, what an eternal pro.

WELDON: Yep.

CRUCCHIOLA: I love how delicately he crafts everything. Mike Flanagan - like, he cares as much as Quentin Tarantino about every inch of a frame, and everything is sort of, like, a love letter to film and television. But he just is - he's a tender heart.

WELDON: His casting director just deserves some props here...

ESCOBAR: Oh, man.

WELDON: ...Because Bruce Greenwood - let's talk about it - like, he wasn't originally cast in this part. That was Frank Langella. And then there was a misconduct investigation, and Langella was dismissed. And they reshot all the scenes with Bruce Greenwood as Roderick Usher. But, you know, he works. He's such a part of the mix here. He's such a part of this ensemble - and that voice, that rumbly, deep basso profundo. And the way he approaches this, I think, makes this thing work. He is not pushing it. He is so chill. He's so naturalistic and so - the scenes with all this weird stuff happening, he is right there in the center, locked in. Those scenes between him and Lumbly - now, that's the framing...

ESCOBAR: Yeah.

WELDON: ...Device, right? You're supposed to just get past that to expedite the story. I wanted to hang out there.

CRUCCHIOLA: I did.

ESCOBAR: You wanted some of that drink?

WELDON: I wanted some of that cognac. Did you guys google that cognac, thinking it was a bit?

CRUCCHIOLA: No.

(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER")

BRUCE GREENWOOD: (As Roderick Usher) Aged in barrels for more than 100 years, and the bottle itself dipped in 18 karat yellow gold inlaid with 4,100 high-quality diamonds. A single pour - it'd probably cost twice your annual salary.

WELDON: It's real, which is criminal.

ESCOBAR: (Laughter).

WELDON: So every time I realize this...

ESCOBAR: Yes.

WELDON: ...It's OK, no. No, these people could suffer. I'm fine with that. The plot of this thing, the structure to the series does get a bit repetitive once you know what's going to happen per episode - part of the appeal, I suppose. Did you guys have any quibbles with the form?

ESCOBAR: I liked it. I felt that, you know, it's a classic horror trope, right? You have a group of people, and then they get killed off one by one by one. And of course, this is a series and not a movie, so it goes a little slower. But I thought there was a fair amount of fun.

WELDON: Sure.

ESCOBAR: At first, I wanted to figure out who was going to die. It took me an episode or two to figure out the order, and also by - that reading the episode titles would help with that. But once you figured that out, it was still very satisfying to watch how each one would descend into a hell of their own making. You just put a pin on it. Yeah. Yeah.

CRUCCHIOLA: A thing that Mike Flanagan is really good at is he has long been, like, very good at just putting a great female character all over the place. Like, how about I just write this well and then cast it well? And then it's going to go off well. And as his ensemble has expanded, he has moved the material to fit the specificity of his ensemble. He has not shoehorned people into parts where it would be awkward for them to play. Or it's been, like, a let's gender flip it, or let's, like, change the race of this character blindly without any regard to, like, who that actual person, actor and character is. And so, like, as you add Rahul Kohli, as you add T'Nia Miller, like, his work just becomes richer as a result of the broad nature of the ensemble that he has in a way that doesn't feel like it's reacting to somebody's notes. He's just bringing together people he loves to work with. And Mike Flanagan will gay up a project delightfully...

WELDON: He will.

CRUCCHIOLA: ...In a will in a way that, like, makes me not feel like I'm watching some sort of performative act of, like, and now let's throw something in for the queers.

WELDON: Yeah.

CRUCCHIOLA: Like, there's tenderness and texture and authenticity to, like, the lived-in nature and the flexibility of, like, the queer people in their stories and in his programming. And I really, really appreciate that about him.

ESCOBAR: Yeah, I thought the diversity was strong, right? That they - it didn't feel forced. It didn't feel like, let's have one of everybody...

CRUCCHIOLA: Yeah.

ESCOBAR: ...So everyone is happy, and no one complains. Like, it didn't feel that way. It felt authentic and interesting. And then because each of the siblings gets their own episode - right? - you're sure that you're going to get time with everybody. There's reason to root for all of their deaths...

CRUCCHIOLA: Yeah (Laughter).

ESCOBAR: ...Some more than others for sure.

WELDON: Yes, that's true. That's true.

ESCOBAR: But, like, there was plenty - I mean, like, get him...

CRUCCHIOLA: (Laughter).

ESCOBAR: ...You know?

WELDON: Yeah.

ESCOBAR: Like, full cut.

CRUCCHIOLA: Get him.

WELDON: Absolutely. That diversity, that tenderness, that approach - that's endemic to Flanagan's work specifically on Netflix. The other thing that's endemic to his work, I got to say, though, is when the supernatural element gets explained, once we figure out what's really going on, we lose the mystery. We lose some of the juice. That's inevitable - at least, to me. Did you guys feel that?

ESCOBAR: I felt like they did a little bit better job. Sometimes you'll watch a horror film and when you finally see the monster, it's like, that's stupid...

WELDON: Yeah.

ESCOBAR: ...I'm done.

WELDON: Yeah.

ESCOBAR: I felt like on here, because of how he was haunted - and the apparitions of the corpses as they showed up were genuinely scary, sometimes more scary than others. But along the way, I felt like those visuals worked even as they did function as reveals. So the central conceit about what's happening is very guessable.

WELDON: Yeah, it is.

ESCOBAR: You know? And I was not surprised by what was happening. But it didn't make the journey less fun. And I would say also when we learned the exact nature of what has happened, it - I was upset by it...

WELDON: Yeah.

ESCOBAR: ...Even though I had predicted it...

CRUCCHIOLA: (Laughter).

ESCOBAR: ...You know?

WELDON: That's the key, I guess.

CRUCCHIOLA: Yeah. Mike Flanagan is going to make upsetting things. Even if you know what's about to happen, he has a way, I think, of crafting something that will just sort of emotionally shred you or still manage a way to find a way to, like, gorily horrify you. And he also does pop up in a little Easter egg scene in the background of a fitness video, if you keep your eyes open.

WELDON: Oh, hey, that's cool. Yeah. I mean, I think there is an inevitability to this, which is part of the horror. And you know you're going to see these kids get kind of knocked off one by one. But in the meantime, we get the Poe stuff. We get all this kind of like, how are they going to invert? How are they going to iterate? How are they going to inflect the Poe content? And that's what kept me going.

CRUCCHIOLA: This is for the people who want to flip through the pages and go back and see what was there and what wasn't. But otherwise, it's - we're just going to make something that's good. And the sort of surprising aspects of that that feel out of place in a contemporary setting, they just become something that feels nicely specific, and therefore it feels enriching. It's not like, you know - it's not another guy named Dave. Like, I want to know what's going to go on at Prospero's club, honestly - more than I want to know what's going on at Rick's club. So, like, there's just something where it's like - it's not dumbing something down for your audience or it's not being like, (inaudible) this down a little bit so people feel like it's more accessible. Like, no, let's make something good and resonant so it's accessible. And then we can add all these fun pieces in that make it feel unique to this project and this adaptation - as there have been so many adaptations of Poe.

ESCOBAR: I guess I would say, you know, there's social critique in here. There's horror. But there's also camp...

CRUCCHIOLA: Yeah (laughter).

ESCOBAR: ...And I appreciated that. Like, there was, like, funny stuff, you know? Like, it wasn't - the whole episode with the cat was hilarious to me...

WELDON: (Laughter).

ESCOBAR: ...Like, the whole thing. And it was nice to have those elements mixed in because it makes the contrast, right? It makes the scary more scary. It makes the dark more dark. And to be able to blend all of those things so well, it was something I really appreciated about it.

WELDON: Absolutely. Well, as you can tell, we kind of liked "The Fall Of The House Of Usher." But we want to know what you think about "The Fall Of The House Of Usher." Find us at facebook.com/pchh. And that brings us to the end of our show. Jordan Crucchiola, Cristina Escobar, thank you so much for being here.

CRUCCHIOLA: Thank you.

ESCOBAR: Thanks for having me.

WELDON: We want to take a moment to thank our POP CULTURE HAPPY HOUR+ subscribers. We appreciate you so much for showing your support of NPR. If you have not signed up yet and want to show your support and listen to the show without a single, solitary sponsor break, head over to plus.npr.org/happyhour or visit the link in our show notes.

This episode was produced by Hafsa Fathima and Liz Metzger and edited by Mike Katzif. Our supervising producer is Jessica Reedy, and Hello Come In provides our theme music. Thank you for listening to POP CULTURE HAPPY HOUR from NPR. I'm Glen Weldon, and we'll see you all tomorrow.

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