The wise decision to rethink the centering of Charles and Diana in the second season of Ryan Murphy’s tabloid anthology drama Feud has allowed a less overheated story to take its place, an unusual seven-year gap leading to an unusually thoughtful follow-up. The first season followed the downward spiral of Joan Crawford and Bette Davis as they pushed each other from bad to worse, a zippy eight-parter that transformed snippets of tawdry behind-the-scenes gossip into a propulsive, if frothy, showbiz drama.
One would assume from both the set-up and marketing of the second season that things would be even cattier this time around, Feud: Capote vs the Swans sold with doctored images of glamorous actors, from Diane Lane to Demi Moore, underlined with the tagline “The Original Housewives”. And while we do get a lot of the bitchiness we expect, spewed by finely coiffed women holding coupe glasses, we also get the poignancy we don’t, the series a rather sad, and surprisingly sensitive, look at the wine-soaked misery behind the baity headlines. Based on the bestselling book Capote’s Women by Laurence Leamer, it offers a time-jumping tale of acrimony and isolation in New York’s high society, led by Truman Capote and his closest female friends and frenemies.
