Feud: Capote vs. The Swans

Because of this show I have a new life goal. I want Tom Hollander as Truman Capote to narrate disparate events. I want him being snarky about the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. I want him talking about the jerseys of players during the NBA All-Star game. I need that urbane razor sharp wit taking the most banal of things apart. To make this clear, I do not want him narrating my personal life, it might get a bit too barbed and don't know if I could survive that. But I would totally let him near ANY Thanksgiving feast and let him loose. Seriously, Joanne Carson's Thanksgiving is seriously one I would buy tickets to. In fact, the show needed to be nothing more than this. And yet it is more. The long awaited second season of Feud brings us that little bit of bygone glamor and a glimpse into celebrity that the first season did seven long years ago. A glimpse that I don't think the long speculated Charles and Diana season could have delivered, though I did admire the snarky dig at the Royal Family in the first few episodes. This is about women who were somebodies just because of their rank. They're who the Real Housewives want to be but never will because these women had an undefinable class that taught them to protect their own and close ranks. Their dirty laundry is never aired, never even spoken about, even amongst themselves, which is why Truman's betrayal hurt them so much. They let him in, they gave him the ammunition, and he didn't understand that to stay in their world he wasn't allowed to use it to make his literary comeback. Tom Hollander is amazing as Capote. After the first few minutes you entirely forget that it is Tom and buy into the fact you are just watching Truman himself. And I can think of no higher compliment than that. Except to invite him to destroy your Thanksgiving, but he has a standing invite from me. And while there's a certain elegance to this show, it suffers as all Ryan Murphy shows do by being uneven and overstaying its welcome. The final episode should have been "Beautiful Babe" which showed the passing of both Babe Paley and Truman. Instead we were left with "Phantasm Forgiveness" which is a ludicrous fever dream wherein Truman belatedly tries to offer up his apologies through his writing of Answered Prayers, a book that in reality was never finished and there was no indication that it was. Even if that final episode did give us a little more time with Jessica Lange and insight into Truman's relationship with his mother, that monstrous relationship could have been left unexplored as this whole series was a love letter to the past and to friendship and love destroyed not about seeing Chloë Sevigny, the weakest actress in the series, dance in a Western bar. Because if there's one thing you'll learn about Truman, it's that he is self-destructive. It's not just the booze and the pills, it's the relationships in his life. While he acts naive about the fallout from "La Côte Basque 1965" he knew he was saying what shouldn't have ever been said. Be he couldn't help himself. He never could. That is why a once brilliant writer ended up alienating all those he loved and his output became nothing more than appearances on talk shows. A caricature of what he once was and could have been again had he ever finished Answered Prayers. But at least this is a fitting eulogy, not just to the society he loved, but to the society he helped destroy, the class of hats and gloves, the unspoken affairs, and the friendships that he ruined.