Who needs it?

Netflix series Ratched is an inscrutable, gratuitously unpleasant origin story

When you dive into one of Ryan Murphy's gilded TV worlds, the show will have impeccable, eye-popping costume and production design. It will shock and awe. It will feature several deliciously dramatic turns from actors ready to chew up every ounce of scenery. His new Netflix drama Ratched features the kind of gory flair that Murphy's leaned into for projects from Nip/tuck to American Horror Story.

It even stars his muse, Sarah Paulson, in a role that asks her to be flinty, cruel, compassionate and lovelorn all at once. But as an origin story for Nurse Ratched, the villain of Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Ratched is a confusing character study that never quite gets a grip on the character it's studying.

The series, conceived by firsttime writer Evan Romansky before Murphy and producer Ian Brennan further developed it, picks up with Mildred Ratched (Paulson) manoeuvring her way into a nurse job at a Northern California psychiatric hospital in 1947, some 15 years before the catastrophic events of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

Mildred is tight-lipped, blunt and skilled at manipulating those around her in order to get what she wants. Romansky's Mildred, unlike Kesey's and Louise Fletcher's of the Milos Forman film, seems at least somewhat interested in the well-being of others. It's just that her definition of what constitutes “well-being” is constantly shifting — and Ratched has trouble keeping up.

Mildred's horrifying past unfurls in fits and starts; by the time the full picture emerges, it's as subtle as an ice pick to the eye. The hospital's patients, combined with the show's slippery grasp of mental illness, makes Ratched feel like a grab bag of trauma rather than revealing how badly unwell people have been treated.

By the finale, anyone asking why we needed a Nurse Ratched backstory may walk away confused. Really, what was the point?