Two limited series on Netflix have strong statements about time, fate, and coincidence.

Bodies (Netflix UK) Based on the graphic novel of the late Si Spencer, this limited series from England could have easily fallen into the trap of looking good on paper but falling flat and being outlandish and ludicrous in its adaptation for TV. But thanks to solid execution, a committed cast of actors, and an uncanny gift of refusing to overplay its hand, the series sucks us in and makes believers of us, even if highly illogical and improbable. The premise is that over four-time frames, 2023, 1941, 1890, and a surprising 2053, four police detectives encounter the same corpse (or sputtering non-corpse) in Longharvest Lane, a deserted insignificant alleyway in London. The body has been shot in the head, the eye specifically; and there are strange glyph marks on the man’s wrist.

What’s admirable in the narrative is how the four detectives become characters we invest in. The present-day detective is an Asian-British woman, while the male detective in 1941 is Jewish - in both cases, discrimination and prejudices against their kind become part of their stories. Shira Haas, who played the lead in Unorthodox, is the detective from the future. The Whitechapel detective from 1890 was working when photography was in its infancy. Naturally, some time frames will work better than others, and it’s the present day and the future juncture that easily became my favorites. Plus, when all is said and done, as is often the case, one may think the final explanation to be less than the sum of the chase to that resolution - but I’ll credit how this one was executed.

Fall of the House of Usher (Netflix USA) - After recent limited series depicting the US opioid crisis, such as Dopesick, were so successful with audiences, you knew it would only be a matter of time before some producer would smartly mix bad pharma with horror/suspense. Luckily, they also turned to Mike Flanagan to direct this mash-up. We now have Edgar Allan Poe’s short story The Fall of the House of Usher, given a modern-day retelling and chronicling the fate of an Usher family behind an evil pharma giant. Flanagan doesn’t stick to the short story alone and liberally ransacks Poe's writing to develop this limited series. Does it always work? That would be the million-dollar question.

Bruce Greenwood as Roderick Usher, the family patriarch, and Mark Hamill as Arthur Pym, family legal counsel, would be the most familiar among the cast. The majority of the cast we’ve seen in Flanagan’s other series, like Wes Anderson, Flanagan enjoys working with an established set that acts like a family within his Flanagan ‘universe.’ The original story was about incest, and this one takes bad pharma and the opioid crisis as its own form of Succession story-telling. Roderick wants to discover why many of his heirs have met grisly deaths. As far as jump scares, the series provides the chills and fear factor. It’s in being convincing about the family and our caring that it falters and perhaps tries to take on too much!