After noping out of one episode of The Golden Bachelor because I could not bear to see elderly people crying, I switched over to trying out the new Fall of the House of Usher series on Netflix, because it turns out I can very much bear watching a bunch of rich shitheels coming to unpleasant ends. The premise of the show is that there is this rich, awful family whose company created a drug called Ligodone, which fueled the opioid epidemic. There is an awful patriarch and an awful matriarch (his sister), and six awful children (two legitimate, four illegitimate) and their mystifyingly un-awful partners. Over the course of the show they all die awful deaths. Nobody who was involved at any level in making this show is trying to pretend this isn’t an elaborate revenge fantasy about the Sacklers, run through an Edgar Allan Poe drip filter. In these times of great division, I think it’s beautiful that we can find unity in our shared antipathy for the goddamn Sacklers. Thanks, Nan Goldin!
Herewith is the definitive, VERY VERY SPOILERY ranking of Ushers based on how much they deserved their nasty, nasty deaths. I have excluded from consideration three characters who I don’t think deserved their deaths at all and therefore can’t be placed on this scale. I will not be taking lip in the comments about whether my ranking was influenced by how hot and charming I think Rahul Kohli is. That is beyond the scope of this study.
Have I made it clear that this post is all spoilers?
It’s all spoilers.
Are we all clear on that?
People who don’t want spoilers have now departed from this post?
Great, okay, here we go.
8. Leo
Leo is by far the best Usher. There are a total of, like, two scenes where an Usher sibling is nice to another Usher sibling, and Leo is one of those siblings both times. He’s genuinely sweet and big-brothery to Perry, and with Camille he has a combative but ultimately fond dynamic.
I’m going to come right out and say it: Leo does not deserve to die. Yes, he has more money than he knows what to do with. Yes, he goes out and does endearing, sexy interviews to help out the Sacklers Ushers when they are getting bad press. Yes, he is cheating on his perfectly nice boyfriend. Leo is a shitty person. I simply do not believe that any of this rises to the level of deserving to be splatted on the concrete. I am shocked anyone thinks he deserves to be splatted on the concrete! Many that die deserve life; can you give it to them, Frodo? Ya know what I mean?
Crucially, for all you animal lovers, he did not kill a cat. No cats were harmed in the making of Leo Usher’s death! We know he did not kill Cat #1, because the last shot of the episode reveals that the original cat is still alive. He also did not gouge out the eyes of Cat #2, because Cat #2 — as far as we can tell — didn’t exist. (Nobody else sees the cat; nobody else sees the pile of dead animals the cat kills.) Leo Usher did not kill a cat and did not deserve to die, end of.
7. Tamerlane
In the cosmic scale of harm done to the universe, Tamerlane ranks low among her siblings. Is her GOOP knock-off subscription box lifestyle brand stupid? Sure. But it’s not in the same realm as any of the ones who work in the family business, and I was not unmoved by Tamerlane saying she wants to get away from her family’s poison legacy and make something. (Again, like, she gets a point for this, but not many points, because the thing she wants to make is really really stupid and she’s doing a very bad job with it.)
I’ve rated her below Leo because she is so mean to everyone all the time, and we see her making a point of being extra cruel to the people who show her any vulnerability. Juno is pitiful, but that’s no reason to treat her like garbage! BillT is an doofus but you have to admit he’s a pretty accommodating doofus. While I applaud Tamerlane for pursuing her specific sexual kink with purpose and intention, it is very unreasonable to make her husband do that one kink (which he obviously isn’t excited about) over and over again (exclusively??) for years and years. Meet a man halfway, Tamerlane! You get the sense that Tamerlane doesn’t think anyone’s real but her, which makes the manner of her demise feel especially fitting. It also looks really beautiful. That hasn’t affected my ranking; I just wanted to give some props to good cinematography.
6. Perry
I have really wrestled with who to put in 5th, 6th, and 7th place. Perry is the youngest Usher sibling, and he hasn’t perhaps altogether settled into his personality and his identity yet. That’s a thing! People screw up really badly in their twenties and then oftentimes they go on to be regular people in regular society. And I do think Perry suffers by being a type of awful that I, personally, find very difficult to take. If you say some shit like that your party’s theme is “anonymous debauchery,” I’m out. Anonymous debauchery. Shut the fuck up. I also found it really ominous and troubling that Perry immediately moves to physical threats when one of his two friends challenges him. I feel that he is on the path to doing intimate partner violence, which uh… does not seem unlikely given the way some of his other siblings behave. Moreover, it’s so irresponsible to not check the water system ahead of time! This was a completely solvable problem that Perry only declined to solve because he’d already said the party was going to be tomorrow. You really did not have to say the party was going to be tomorrow, Perry! It could have been any day! Any post-checking-out-the-water-before-making-it-the-centerpiece-of-your-dumb-orgy day would have been fine! Christ.
Still, though. He’s very young, like maybe 22?, and you can see that he’s intensely vulnerable to his father and his other siblings. (Props to the actor.) Maybe he would have found a less awful way to interface with the world if he’d had another few years. Maybe! Or maybe not.
5. Camille
Camille, for me, marks a step up in scale. Where the higher-ranked Ushers are personally awful, Camille is structurally awful. As the PR person for Fortunato, she’s made a career out of buying the company positive press when cool people like Auguste Dupin and Nan Goldin try to hold them to account. Gross! This is very bad. She is sexually exploiting her personal assistants, rude; she keeps creepy little blackmail files on everyone, I get it but yuck; and I have to suspect there’s a non-zero amount of racism hiding behind her vicious enmity for Victorine.
The thing about Camille is that she’s the only Usher who gets to be… I’m sorry, but… competent? As much as I have tried to resist the mid-aughts zeitgeist of horrible people doing horrible things with competence and style, I have not gotten away clean. All the other Ushers are dithering around playing video games or cheating their data or saying “anonymous debauchery” (shut up, Perry), but Camille gets shit done, and I was not immune to that, nor to Kate Siegel’s charisma and beauty. I am sorry! I’m only human!
4. Vic
Much like poor, doomed Ali, I really thought Victorine might be okay. Okay on the scale of Usher siblings! She doesn’t say or do as much rich-person bullshit as the others, and her life’s work is genuinely worthwhile. I think. I don’t understand heart mesh. Only, just as Perry lost me when he didn’t check the water tanks, Victorine lost me when I learned she was falsifying her results. First of all, morally that is not okay. Secondly, it’s a profound act of intellectual laziness, and Victorine is explicitly doing it for money. Thirdly, it sounds like she’s doing a very slapdash job of it. Of course Al was going to find out! Sweet, precious Al. She really ought not have dated an Usher.
My favorite deaths are the ones where Verna reeeeeeally gives them space to walk back from the ledge. Quite apart from my fondness for “The Tell-Tale Heart,” I love a tragedy whose central figure is given dozens of possible outs and takes none of them. When Verna appears to Vic as a vulnerable, open-faced potential first candidate for human trials, Vic has every opportunity to deal honestly and compassionately with her. She simply chooses not to. It’s absolutely cold-blooded, and Vic keeps on choosing it.
Still, the question of scale would probably have given Vic a better ranking on this list if not for what she does to Al. Even if you grant that throwing the bookend was a mistake, rather than an intentional act of murder, I have rarely had a more upsetting media experience than the objectively one-minute-long but subjectively interminable scene in which Vic waits for Al to die. It is so, so chilling.
3. Madeline
I can’t say much about Madeline because Mary McDonnell kind of looks like Catherine O’Hara in that wig so all I could see when she was on screen was Moira Rose. Did Mary McDonnell do a good job in the role? I don’t know, and I literally never will.
Madeline made Fortunato what it is, and she chose to doom her baby niece and nephew to premature deaths so she could get ahead. She sucks. One of my absolute favorite little realizations in this show — I like it more and more the more I think of it — is that, okay, Madeline is this brilliant woman, I think Roderick says “four or five in a generation” to give a sense of the scale of her brilliance, and she spends her whole life working to create immortality in an algorithm. That’s what she cares about, the thing she hopes to use to consolidate her power over the company after Roderick gets voted out, her legacy. And in the end, what does it all amount to? Her immortal AI version of sweet, good little Lenore? Nonsense words. It’s all for nothing. It’s a fucking failure.
2. Roderick
GOD Roderick Usher sucks. He suuuuuucks. By far the weakest element of the show were the flashbacks, which occupied way too much real estate for how much actual story they got us. And the most maddening thing about the flashbacks was how completely flopsy and incompetent Roderick Usher is. He has one good idea, and he rides that fucking train all the way to the end. Everything else is Madeline’s idea and Madeline’s plan. Roderick is just there.
I obviously don’t forgive him for agreeing to a bargain whereby his existing children would die young in exchange for him getting rich and never going to jail; but I extra don’t forgive him, after he made the bargain, for not using two forms of birth control every time he had sex thereafter. My guy! COME ON. Even if he didn’t fully believe that the deal was real, you would think a simple sense of financial self-interest would lead him to make better choices in his sex life. What an asshole. My only regret, really, is that the actual moment of death wasn’t worse and longer for Roderick. I guess he suffered from watching all his kids die, but it’s not the same kind of suffering as, for instance, watching a jagged piece of rock swing slowly closer and closer to ripping your shitty guts out.
1. Froderick
Speaking of which! Froderick is the worst Usher and he deserved it the most. What he does to his wife is viscerally horrifying on its own, but what makes it extra hideous is that he brings his daughter into it. Lenore tries her utmost best to stay on top of the problem, and of course she ultimately saves the day because she is a good girl and a hero, but of course she was going to find out what was going on, and of course it was going to traumatize her for life. Awful, shitty Froderick did not care about that as much as he cared about getting revenge on his wife for an offense she didn’t actually commit. I am glad he had to lie there feeling dread and terror as the jagged piece of rock swung closer and closer to ripping his guts out. If anything, it could have lasted longer; but I get that TV is finite, and Carla Gugino already ate.
No gif for Froderick. He doesn’t deserve a gif. Fuck that guy.
Thank you for coming. Please share your dissenting opinions in the comments section.