Review: ‘Ratched’ — Season One ★★★☆☆
By: Dan Owen
Tags: Review, Netflix, TV, Culture, Television

Loosely based on the character Louise Fletcher won an Academy Award for playing in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975), Ratched finds American Horror Story stalwart Sarah Paulson as the eponymous mental health nurse. This is a prequel set in 1947, California, but there’s so little connective tissue between this Netflix series and Cuckoo’s Nest that one wonders why they bothered. Maybe a series without Mildred Ratched’s memorable surname wouldn’t have piqued enough people’s interest, but for all intents and purposes, this is American Horror Story: Asylum Part II.

Surely Netflix could have sold it on that alone?

While created by Evan Romansky, Ryan Murphy and his frequent collaborator Ian Brennan developed Ratched, which prompts the usual concerns. Every show they’re involved with tends to go the same way: a juicy high concept, strong performances, and early shocks slowly meanders around before an implosive and unsatisfying finale. It’s almost become comical how inescapable that arc is. They’re great at developing a “big idea” and may even manage to write an entertaining half-season (the stuff that got them excited to make the show to begin with), but things inevitably slip and everything crumbles to dust.

Ratched is no exception, alas.

Nurse Ratched (Paulson) attends a job interview at the Lucia State Hospital run by Dr Hanover (Jon Jon Briones), where she’s unsuccessful but manages to use her skills of manipulation and deception to earn Hanover’s favour. Now on the nursing staff and clashing with stern Nurse Bucket (Judy Davis), the plot thickens when it becomes apparent Ratched has a connection to a particularly infamous patient (Finn Wittrock) locked, Hannibal Lecter-style, in a dungeon-like jail beneath the facility. Added to that, there’s a wealthy heiress (Sharon Stone) with a pet monkey who’s hired a hitman (Corey Stoll) to decapitate someone at the hospital who caused her son to lose his limbs, a crazy black woman with disassociative identity disorder (Sophie Okonedo), a disfigured orderly (Charlie Carver), a lesbian press secretary (Cynthia Nixon) who falls for Ratched, and a ne’er-do-well state governer (Vincent D’Onofrio) up for reelection.

Ratched throws a lot of balls in the air, juggles them for maybe four or five episodes, then the most exciting storylines resolve and it has to keep chugging along on fumes. Mercifully, there are only eight episodes, instead of the usual 10 or 13. But that makes it even more disappointing the writers couldn’t weave less hours of entertainment together.

The first four episodes are the best, if only because everything’s fresh and things are being discovered at a quicker rate. It’s also the most consistently made, as two episodes are directed by Murphy, two written by creator Romansky, and two by Ian Brennan. There’s even an early two-parter called “Angel of Mercy” that resolves a lot of the early plot strands, and provides a launchpad for more stories. It’s just the stories they come up with aren’t as strong and one’s patience gets tested.

As mentioned before, there are qualities to Murphy/Brennan shows that are always strong regardless of flaws elsewhere. Ratched looks sublime with its late-1940s fashions and vintage vehicles, with gleaming colours and smart production design. I particularly liked the turquoise nurse uniforms that match Ratched’s car. The music by Mac Quayle is also strong, evoking lots of classic Hollywood tunes, with an opening theme of “Danse Macabre, Op. 40” that quickly became an unmissable favourite. (You may recall its earlier use as Jonathan Creek’s theme tune — hear it below.) And the performances are great, especially Judy Davis as Nurse Betsy Bucker, who has exceptionally good body movements when delivering her lines. Stone’s recurring role is also memorable, if only because it suggests Ryan Murphy may be trying to resuscitate her career — as he did for Jessica Lange with American Horror Story. Cynthia Nixon is also strong in a role that’s the least twisted and baroque of the bunch, and all the better for it.

Sarah Paulson is also good in the title role, of course — even if she’s poorly served by the material. Nurse Ratched became a classic Hollywood villain thanks to Cuckoo’s Nest, but while early episodes toy with that authoritarian and cruel persona… she’s mostly sympathetic and strays away from her own introduction. It’s a strange decision, as antiheroes remain popular (and we don’t have many female ones), but despite Ratched lobotomising a priest, the writers quickly steer away from her coldheartedness.

I’m tempted to suggest Paulson didn’t know what she was playing week to week on-set, but she’s an executive producer so can actually shoulder part of the blame. And it’s another reason this “prequel” feels like nothing of the sort, as the series has no intention of staring into Ratched’s heart of darkness. She’s too sympathetic already and it would now seem out of character for her to be mean to patients after just one season. Imagine if NBC’s Hannibal (a similarly odd prequel TV series to a classic movie villain that began life in a book) ended its first year with viewers thinking it would be weird is Lecter started eating human flesh. Isn’t that an outright failure of writing?

Of course, these issues are annulled if you simply don’t consider Ratched a direct prequel to anything, as it certainly doesn’t behave like one. I’m happy to pretend this character isn’t destined to age into Louise Fletcher.

I can only hope season 2 corrects mistakes and finds better storylines, but this is the same wish that goes ignored with latter-day American Horror Story. Maybe I need to accept defeat.

Cast & Crew

writers: Evan Romansky, Ian Brennan & Jennifer Salt.

directors: Ryan Murphy, Nelson Cragg, Michael Uppendahl, Jessica Yu, Jennifer Lynch & Daniel Minahan.

starring: Sarah Paulson, Finn Wittrock, Cynthia Nixon, Jon Jon Briones, Charlie Carver, Judy Davis & Sharon Stone.