Every Mike Flanagan Netflix show ranked from worst to best

2. The Fall of the House of Usher

Just as the ink dries on Mike Flanagan’s Netflix contract, he has the audacity to give us another deliciously macabre show to savor – and it’s freaking fantastic. Once upon a time, Edgar Allen Poe and Succession had a spooky dinner, and that’s how The Fall of the House of Usher was born. It’s delightfully dark, dabbling in both the creepy and the candid, sometimes tiptoeing on the completely outrageous.

Flanagan’s farewell to Netflix is a beautiful homage to Poe’s works, in which Flanagan treats the iconic stories with both reverence and fresh zest. Though by the end of the series we all knew what would happen – just not how – it still managed to give us plenty of emotional damage and have us cry for eye bleach to unsee Madeleine’s state in that last episode.

The casting is flawless, and it’s quite possibly to most perfectly cast show other than Haunting of Hill House. Carla Gugino is, to no one’s surprise, perfect. Literally, this woman can absolutely do no wrong. Mark Hamill was phenomenal as Arthur Pym, the weirdly almost paternal and firm lawyer who basically made sure the Ushers stayed out of legal problems. And a shoutout to Kate Siegel for always blowing my mind and doing it even harder with this performance as Camille – but why, oh why, did Camille have to die so soon? With every episode, I found myself longing for a sprinkle more of her captivating presence.

This was the perfect way to end Flanagan’s stint with Netflix, and it takes the second place in this ranking.