valiantprince

Okay, aside from agreeing with the many reviewers who have lauded this miniseries, I'm really not here to discuss the writing, directing, and acting. Granted, I loved all three, and I find the negative reviews that seem dead set on convincing the rest of us that we didn't really enjoy the series, sadly unimaginative.

No, what I want to discuss-and the reason I'm giving this brilliant series a 9 rather than a 10-is the choice of title. As much as I enjoyed every bit of this Flanagan/Siegel masterpiece, it simply is NOT The Haunting of Hill House. Shirley Jackson's novel, even according to Shirley Jackson, was never really about ghosts or other supernatural phenomena. It was about the people who research supernatural phenomena and their personal motivations. The novel is full of questionable occurrences and isolated events with never quite sufficient evidence or at least no more than one witness. What Flanagan and Siegel have done here is take versions of the Hill House researchers and recast their types (many with the same first names) as members of a new fictional Crain family, and the ghosts are pretty hard to dismiss. Honestly, I don't see why they didn't just call it the Craine Hauntings or some such. It's a great series, but it owes next to nothing to Shirley Jackson's novel.

The story is cobbled together from 60s and 70s rock clichés, and the original songs are hideous. The selected 70s music in the soundtrack serves only to punctuate how awful the original tunes are. None of the songs in the first three episodes has a decent hook, and the lyrics are so bad they make Suicide Is Painless sound like pure genius-and that song was written by a fifteen-year-old trying to write "the stupidest song ever written." The original tunes in Daisy Jones and the Six are bland and in no way memorable. Also, although Riley Keough is not a bad actress, she can barely carry a tune and has zero vocal power. I've watched the first three episodes, but I won't be watching the rest.