At least three layers of appeal lure us into the semi-guilty pleasure that is writer/director Ryan Murphy’s Feud: Bette and Joan, an eight-part limited series that premiered last Sunday on FX. First, there is the tawdry thrill of the “feud” element — the barely suppressed rivalry and delectable nastiness between “aging” stars Bette Davis and Joan Crawford (as played, potently, by Susan Sarandon and Jessica Lange, respectively) coming together to make Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, 1962’s campy classic. Cattiness, bitter words, ripe insults, and even the c word fly amid product-plugging Pepsi bottles, poisonous hearsay, and attempts to mediate the stormy relations by director Robert Aldrich (Alfred Molina).
Secondly, we also happily bask in the lovingly and kitsch-ish attention paid to period details, with the saturated color palette and retro-hip fashion tactics presaged by one of those shows that helped cement the new, upgraded aesthetic of television in recent years, Mad Men. The new drama, lavishly realized by production designer Judy Becker and cinematographer Nelson Cragg, is a Technicolor-dream-coated vision of that transitional between zone of the late ’50s and early ’60s, in the dizzy afterglow of an earlier Hollywood golden age and before the mid- to late-’60s counter-culture redefined what was hip and sellable.
Thirdly — and the closest to broaching a more serious subject — there is a compelling layer of interest in the plight of Hollywood actresses of “a certain age,” often deprived of worthy roles despite their artistic vitality. It doesn’t help when said veteran females had a history of bucking the studio system and the rampant misogyny in the industry. “They’re not making women’s pictures anymore,” says Crawford, trying to convince her rival to collaborate. Later, Davis plainly nails their volatile relationship in the dressing room of the studio where Baby Jane is being birthed: “I don’t like you, and you don’t like me, but we need each other.”