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Welcome to Episodic Medium’s coverage of the latest installment of FX’s anthology drama Feud. This review is free for all, but subsequent reviews will be exclusively for paid subscribers. To read along for only $5 a month, become a supporter of Episodic Medium.

How do you feel about what-might’ve-beens? All those movies abandoned or lost? The aborted albums? The unpublished books? Does it excite you to get even the smallest sense of what was intended, via whatever surviving fragments still exist? Or is the whole exercise, in the end, just too frustrating?

Throughout the 1970s, author and raconteur Truman Capote was one of the most recognizable celebrities in the United States, even though he didn’t really do much of anything anymore, aside from guesting on TV talk shows and showing up at any New York society event where news photographers might be present. He talked a lot back then about the novel he was writing: something intended to be as innovative and insightful as his epochal novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s and his true-crime “non-fiction novel” In Cold Blood. The book was to be called Answered Prayers, and it was going to turn the cocktail party high society gossip that had become Capote’s stock-in-trade into something lightly fictionalized yet brutally frank.

Capote died in 1984 at age 59, never having completed Answered Prayers. The reasons for this are manifold, but the most popular excuse is that he shot himself in the foot by selling a chapter of the novel called “La Côte Basque 1965” to Esquire in 1975. The excerpt’s vivid sketch of casual criminality and sexual misadventures among America’s super-rich provoked an immediate, appalled reaction among Capote’s social circle; and given that he relied on their company for inspiration (and, to an alarming degree, for money, food, and alcohol), he couldn’t write any more once he became an outcast. Allegedly.

The second season of the FX/Hulu anthology drama Feud is about Capote’s “La Côte Basque”-induced downfall. Titled Capote vs. The Swans, it’s partly the story of Capote’s complicated relationship with some of the mid 20th century’s wealthiest and most accomplished people, and partly—in a very, very roundabout way—an adaptation of a legendarily unfinished novel. Answered Prayers was meant to be both thinly veiled journalism and thinly veiled autobiography. This Feud rips off all those veils.

But—and this is a big but—is bringing a famously lost book to the screen a worthwhile endeavor in and of itself? Even if—and this is a big if—it may not make for good TV?

Two episodes into Capote vs. The Swans, I’m not sure how to answer these questions. There’s a lot in these first two hours to like, and an uncomfortable amount that strikes me as artlessly blunt and excruciatingly shrill. The thorniest problem, honestly? The parts of these episodes that are hardest to take actually feel the most like the handful of Answered Prayers chapters that were eventually published. So… mission accomplished?

This season’s first episode, “Pilot,” begins with a brief glimpse of the author just before his death, then jumps back a decade or so to a vignette that introduces the story’s central relationship: between Capote (Tom Hollander), arguably America’s most celebrated author at the time, and Babe Paley (Naomi Watts), the journalist and socialite married to broadcast television pioneer Bill Paley (Treat Williams). Truman comforts Babe as she tells him about discovering evidence of her husband’s affair with New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller’s wife Happy… in the form of bedsheets stained with Happy’s menstrual blood.

Viewers familiar with Capote’s work will recognize this scene as one of the most memorable and shocking tidbits in “La Côte Basque,” and “Pilot” quickly follows it up with another, as the episode flashes back even further to Capote’s first weekend getaway with the Paleys, where he entertained their guests by telling them the “true” story of how model and actress Ann Woodward (Demi Moore) murdered her rich husband and passed it off as a tragic accident. Later in the episode we see Truman at the Manhattan restaurant La Côte Basque, dining with Babe, C.Z. Guest (Chloë Sevigny) and Slim Keith (Diane Lane). There, they all swap gossip and eyeball the other famous diners—including Woodward.

These three sequences capture the meat of “La Côte Basque,” which itself isn’t so much a short story as it is a series of entertainingly dishy anecdotes, recounted to Answered Prayers’ very Capote-esque narrator P.B. Jones, who offers his own catty private observations about the women dining around him. In “Pilot,” Capote is urged to write “La Côte Basque” by his lunch date John O’Shea (Russell Tovey), a self-described middle-class suburban straight guy—with a wife, a kids, and a boring job as a bank executive—whom Truman met and had sex with in a gay bathhouse. O’Shea doesn’t fit in with Capote or his coterie of primped-up, privileged “Swans,” but he surmises—not incorrectly—that other normies like himself would love to get the kind of glimpse into their surprisingly savage world that he gets at that one meal.

Episode two, “Ice Water in Their Veins,” covers the immediate aftermath to Esquire’s publication of “La Côte Basque.” While Capote is relatively safe from the fallout in Los Angeles—where he’s staying with Johnny Carson’s ex-wife Joanne (Molly Ringwald) and filming a cameo in Neil Simon’s farcical mystery movie Murder By Death—Slim Keith is rallying The Ladies Who Lunch to give Truman the big freeze-out, in perpetuity. Their chilliness deeply wounds Capote, who has to spend Thanksgiving of 1976 exiled from the people whose company he most enjoyed. But it hurts Babe too, who is going through cancer treatments without the tender touch and sympathetic ear of one of her most cherished pals.

As I said, there are moments in these first two episodes that hit just right—especially for someone like me who grew up in the 1970s and ‘80s and can recall firsthand what a towering cultural figure Truman Capote was. (Granted, I didn’t really know why he was a big deal until I got older… but such was the nature of the ‘70s, where the TV was filled with game show panelists and talk show guests who were famous for things they’d more or less stopped doing by the time I first saw them.)

So yes, it’s a trip to see that the original Esquire issue featuring “La Côte Basque” had Rich Little on the cover, and it’s a hoot to see Truman replaced at lunch by Jackie O’s sister Lee Radziwill (Calista Flockhart). It’s fascinating to hear the Swans discuss other gay men—Bill Bass, maybe?—who could become their new companions and confidants. It’s haunting to see a drunken and depressed Capote enduring a vision of his mother Lillie Mae (Jessica Lange), coaxing him toward death.

There are fine details and insights sprinkled throughout these episodes that really capture this time and Capote’s place in it—right down to the way the author times his entry into La Côte Basque so that he won’t be too early or too late, and the way that his girlfriends are at once embarrassed and excited at being the center of attention when Ann Woodward confronts Truman about his cruel gossip. Hollander and Watts do some poignantly subtle work after the Esquire fiasco, as Truman and Babe realize they’ve lost something special, perhaps forever. (Given that Babe is already dying in 1976, their time for reconciliation is short.)

But it’s telling that I’ve gotten this far into this review and I haven’t mentioned that these first two episodes were directed by Gus Van Sant (an American indie film stalwart and a pioneer of New Queer Cinema) or that the entire series is being written by Jon Robin Baitz (an accomplished playwright who has been shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize multiple times). And that’s because, in the early going at least, there’s something unpleasantly discordant about this Feud season.

The writing is sometimes just… bad. Characters state the themes of the piece outright, in flat and clunky terms—especially the women, whose conversations in the second episode in particular all tend toward one-dimensional platitudes about unity and sisterhood. And Van Sant doesn’t seem to have a strong handle on the tone in these first two episodes. The rhythm is plodding, the scenes feel disconnected, and the overall mood is too dark and tinged with tragedy for even any camp value to emerge.

Granted, neither Van Sant or Baitz is know for camp; and as I stated earlier, the harshness of Capote vs. The Swans is to some extent inherent in the material. Try reading the published chapters of Answered Prayers sometime. They are riotous, yes, with their never-ending litany of filthy stories and jaw-dropping confessions. But they’re also corrosive and creepy—and more than a little self-flagellating. Read those chapters and you’ll understand how Truman Capote could let someone like John O’Shea into his life, to belittle and bully him and even sock him square in the face.

But just because—as C.Z. says at one point—“there was a certain goddamn truth to it all” doesn’t make it any easier to watch a man drink himself into a stupor and set fire to his career and his personal life. I’m fascinated by this season of Feud, and I’ll keep watching. (Heck, I’d better… I’m reviewing it weekly for this here newsletter!) But I agree with C.Z. when she corrects Truman’s instance that his “accurate account” doesn’t mean he never loved his friends. “There’s no love in those pages,” she says of “La Côte Basque.” So far, that also describes how I feel about Capote vs. The Swans.

• A good read, if you’re a New York/Vulture subscriber: Liz Smith’s in-depth 1976 article on the aftermath of “La Côte Basque” in New York and Hollywood society. Here’s the link.

• The Swans don’t seem especially interested in the dish known as “Country Captain” but it was something I enjoyed a lot as a little southern boy and then rediscovered as an adult when a Top Chef contestant won a challenge with it a few years back. Look up a recipe and give it a try!

• Using Thanksgiving as the button on “Ice Water in Their Veins” is smart in some ways, because Capote (as he notes in the episode) did write some very popular holiday stories. Baitz does ground us in the timeline too, by having Capote listen to Bryan Ferry’s cover of “Let’s Stick Together” (released in the fall of ’76) and watch the acclaimed TV drama Family (also a 1976 debut). But it’s still a bit confusing to have the Swans in the episode treat “La Côte Basque,” published in 1975, as fresh news, when much of the action takes place one year later.

• Y’know, with Capote as the subject, this Feud season could’ve just as easily tackled the author’s rivalries with Gore Vidal or Tennessee Williams. We do get a solid shot at Williams in these episodes though, when Capote suggests that the writing on Family is “so good, Tennessee would be jealous.”

• I am looking forward to (I hope) more of the contrast between New York society and Hollywood society, as evidenced by the two very different Thanksgiving prayers: one reserved and snooty, and one earnest and hippy-dippy.

• As someone who loved Murder By Death as a kid, I was delighted by the scenes of Capote fumbling his way through his monologue, even if they reconfirmed something I discovered when I rewatched the movie a few years ago: It doesn’t really hold up. (It’s no “Country Captain,” in other words.)

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