And you thought your family had problems.

Mike Flanagan’s latest – and for Netflix, his last – miniseries takes its title, and plots, and character names, etc. from the works of Edgar Allen Poe. The Fall of the House of Usher, though, obviously draws inspiration from more modern tales, such as that of the criminal Sackler pharmaceutical firm. The billionaire owners of Purdue Pharma, who though they avoided all criminal charges, were ordered to pay $6 billion dollars to help the victims of the opioid crisis that was in large part of their making.

This mish-mosh of Poe tales and characters, combined with modern themes like addiction crises and social media image-rehabiltation, make for an uneven series that, compared to Flanagan’s previous miniseries, like The Haunting of Hill House, The Haunting of Bly Manor, and Midnight Mass, falls well short, both in character development and bone-chilling terror.

Flanagan, who wrote the teleplay with Justina Ireland, transports the Poe tale of doomed siblings Roderick and Madeline Usher from a dreary European castle to a modern-day American manor, where Roderick Usher (Bruce Greenwood) lives in conspicuous wealth with his new wife Juno (Ruth Codd). Roderick and his twin sister Madeline (Mary McDonnell) are the CEO and COO, respectively, of Fortunato Pharmaceuticals.

The miniseries takes us back and forth through time – typical for a Flanagan story – to different points in Roderick and Madeline’s life. We see them as youngsters, getting castigated for being seen on the property of their father, Mr. Longfellow, who wants nothing to do with the bastard twins of the secretary (Annabeth Gish) he impregnated. We see them again as teens, during the very odd circumstances of their mother’s death, and as young adults (played by Zach Gilford and Willa Fitzgerald), working their way into the Fortunato business which was taken over by dictatorial businessman Rufus Griswold (Michael Trucco).

But it is in the modern day, where Rufus and Madeline are near retirement-age, where the bulk of the story takes place. Though Madeline has remained childless, the same cannot be said for Rufus, who has six children. Two are legitimate, conceived with his first wife Annabel Lee, while the rest are a collection of bastards he sired on random women throughout his life.

Frederick (Henry Thomas) and Tamerlane (Samantha Sloyan) are the two “true” Usher progeny, but Roderick has opened his home (if not his heart) and his estate to the other four: Victorine LaFourcade (T;nia Miller), Leo Usher (Rahul Kohli), Camille L’Espanaye (Kate Siegel) and Prospero “Perry” Usher (Sauriyan Sapkota).

There are other family members, like Frederick’s wife Morella (Crystal Balint) and daughter Lenore (Kyliegh Curran) and Tamerlane’s fitness guru husband Bill (Matt Biedel) that play a part in the family drama, if not the business.

The Usher family business, and specifically Roderick, is facing charges of putting a new opiate on the market which is responsible for a ghastly amount of deaths – over 100,000. Unlike the Sackler family, they are facing criminal charges, and the main prosecutor is C. Auguste Dupin, played by Carl Lumbly. Lumbly is facing off against the family’s loyal retainer, Arthur Pym, aka “the Pym Reaper”, played by Mark Hamill, sounding more like the Joker than Luke Skywalker.

At trial, we see Dupin admit to the family there is an informant in their ranks who has given him all the evidence he needs to win the trial. This news works to finally split apart the fractured and fractious family. They turn on each other, demanding to know who the turncoat is. Roderick even places a bounty on the head of the informant, offering a huge some of money to whoever identifies the traitor.

This seems to work to Dupin’s advantage, but in another departure from real-life headlines, the Usher family refuses to settle. But something else is at work to stop the trial from proceding: the cold hand of Death.

During a break in the trial, Roderick invites Auguste to his old and now decrepit childhood home, to explain to Dupin his culpability – not in the deaths due to his company’s drug – but of all of his children. The two enjoy a very specific brand of cognac as Roderick relates the stories of their deaths, and this is the framing device around which all the episodes revolve.

And what gruesome deaths they are. Each episode takes great pains to link the death of one of the Usher heirs to a Poe tale – “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Black Cat,” “The Pit and the Pendulum,” “The Masque of the Red Death,” and so on. And each victim haunts Roderick, invisibly to others but not to Roderick, or us. There’s a point in each episode where a horrified Roderick is startled by the grisly remains of each of his dead children.

Hovering around every tale is the closest thing to a villain the series has, the shape-shifting Verna, played by Carla Gugino. She first appears as a bartender who serves drinks to young adult Roderick and Madeline during a fateful New Year’s Eve celebration in 1980, then returns to grimly and efficiently dispatch each unfortunate Usher. If you know your Poe, and you like word games, you can anagram Verna’s name to get an idea of who her character represents.

Perhaps Flanagan was wrong to weave in so many Poe references in the story, as that proves more of a distraction than addition to the tale. What’s lacking though, are characters we can care about. We revile the wealthy Usher children who have been shielded from consequences for their negative behavior their whole lives, almost to the point where we take pleasure in their gruesome ends. And none of the deaths seem to evoke any emotion in the siblings or parents left behind. If anything, the remaining siblings are profoundly irritated by the inconvenience of it all. They should at least be afraid for their own skin, if nothing else, but aside from an increased security detail, they all seem determined to follow their own hubris to their doom.

The truly affecting Flanagan stories we’ve seen before were also about families and relationships, but these were families that truly loved each other. Their deaths rocked their family members, with the effects rippling down through generations, and they left the audience as shattered as the characters. There is far to little of that in The Fall of the House of Usher.

As a piece of horror, well, it is horrible how the Ushers meet their demise, but there are more jump scares her than anything else. Missing is the cold, creeping dread a viewer feels watching and waiting for the inevitable to happen to a character we have grown to care about.

All of this is not to say that The Fall of the House of Usher is unwatchable. Flanagan tends to use the same actors from project to project, and that’s because they are very good at helping him tell his stories. This is not bad television. It’s only when you compare this to Flanagan’s earlier, more sublime works, that you feel the loss.

Perhaps this is another type of curse, from the streaming service that was once home to all of his projects, but lost him to Amazon Prime. Another mystery, surely. Here’s hoping that Flanagan’s next project brings back stories and characters with heart, even if we are only going to watch as it is ripped out of them, and us.