Ratched

“Ratched” is a far cry from a faithful prequel to the landmark book and film it’s inspired by, but far more troublesome is how bad the series is on its own. Forget the IP; these first eight episodes don’t hold together as, well, anything. Part ’40s melodrama, part early aughts torture porn, “Ratched” isn’t frightening, affecting, or even all that interesting. It’s thrown together folly and nothing sticks.

It takes all eight episodes for Ratched’s sibling heist to come to fruition, but by that time the plot has become so convoluted that it barely matters. ... Perhaps this is the central weakness of “Ratched”: there is nothing bubbling underneath the surface. Romansky and Murphy throw everything at the screen, and all at once.

What "Ratched" has in excess, which is saying something, are grand performances from extraordinary actors playing the hell out of parts that don't live up to their talents. ... But what came out of the other end of this treatment is an unhatched egg of a narrative entirely consumed by style.

It will surprise no one familiar with the Murphy brand of horror to know that Paulson crushes the material she’s given, and that the physical world she and her costars inhabit is uniquely lush, peculiar and macabre. It’s a shame, then, that it’s also frustratingly opaque, gratuitously unpleasant and shortsighted in its attempts to be as grim and grisly as possible. By the season finale, anyone asking why we needed a Nurse Ratched backstory like this may walk away even more confused.

Murphy’s productions always tend to favor style over substance — aside from FX’s triumphant Pose, which finds the beating human heart inside its flamboyant characters — but this might be his emptiest effort yet.

Ultimately, Ratched fails to deliver not just because it doesn't have a handle on its lead and can’t locate its horror, but because it has limited vision and poor follow-through. The elements of this story are so inelegantly mashed together that they may as well have come out of a blender.