FEUD: CAPOTE VS. THE SWANS. Whoever said, "Hating someone is like drinking poison every day and expecting the other person to die," clearly never saw The Princess Bride. Of course, there is a caustic burn going down, but a good low-stakes grudge can be energizing, feeding competition and giving focus to the day's million scattered frustrations. There's nothing like a good nemesis, real or imagined, to add a little dramatic background music to the day. (Provided you have time; most of us have outsourced to team rivalries and reality TV.) It's the strength of the poison that gets us. A feud that begins as a love story is too high stakes to be purely entertaining, too founded in real pain, the very thing from which a petty rivalry is meant to distract one.

That I haven't yet watched the acclaimed first season of Feud, from the prolific Ryan Murphy, Jaffe Cohen and Michael Zam, and focused on the icy bridge between Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, is some kind of self-harm by omission. (Listen, 2017 was a rough one and the series slipped down in my to-do list with a mountain of emails that still haunt me.) Season two, Feud: Capote vs. The Swans, helmed by Gus Van Sant, with an episode each directed by Max Winkler and Jennifer Lynch, draws from Capote's Women by Laurence Leamer. For eight episodes, of which only four have aired as of press time, we glide and stumble through New York City high society beginning in the 1960s, as Truman Capote befriends and betrays an elite set of women he calls his "swans" by publishing their thinly veiled secrets. Ending his writer's block and returning to fame with the sacrifice of their friendship is meat enough for a series, but the power of the story is in the fallout, Capote's need to win them back and his waves of self-destruction fanning out to everyone who loves him anyway.

The first episode opens with a stunner of a story involving the lurid reveal of TV mogul Bill Paley's (Treat Williams in his final role) affair and Capote (Tom Hollander) sweeping into the offering solace, sass and sleeping pills to straight-lady bestie Babe Paley (Naomi Watts). Famous but not rich from his masterpiece In Cold Blood, Capote is the star of dinner parties and lunches at La Côte Basque, the lone homosexual in a conservative wealth bubble, spinning gossip that ought to give his hosts pause about sharing their own secrets. (It does not.) Certainly Ann Woodward (Demi Moore) has regrets as Capote spreads the story that she murdered her husband, but her cautionary tale cautions nobody. Instead, he shares every confidence, offering enough clever entertainment, flattery and attention to keep his place in their circle. But his star is waning on the literary front, his draft is well overdue, the advance has been spent and he's doing far more drinking than writing as he wallows in what he thinks is the vanishing of his gift. With all the raw material before him, telling tales out of school and in print feels inevitable. The swans' retaliatory shunning is more of a coordinated effort, but it, too, wounds deep.

The look and feel of the period from the sets to the meals to the costuming are enough to keep one watching week to week — bingeing all at once might be disorienting enough to encourage the purchase cigarettes and of very strong hairspray. (I admit to pausing at every meal to see the souffles and vintage table settings.) But the performances lift Capote vs. The Swans beyond reenactment and titillating nostalgia. Hollander, whose mysterious turn in White Lotus I will not spoil here for those who haven't enjoyed it yet, doesn't let Capote's famously weird voice totally distract us from his own turmoil. He is in turn insufferable and self-aware, grand and horribly small. Watts melts into her role to give Babe grace and depth as her perfection is worn away and she grapples with the end of her friendship with Truman. The challenge is less to justify the feud than to show us why and how much it hurt. She plays it for what it is, the loss of the love of her life. Diane Lane and Chloë Sevigny do fine supporting work as fellow swans Slim Keith and C.Z. Guest, but Jessica Lange's scenes with Hollander overshadow theirs. As his late mother, returning to haunt and taunt him, her purring attacks are just shy of over the top, packing emotional punch and laying out the writers' case for the origin of Capote's self-loathing and the vendetta on high society he carries out on her behalf.

Van Sant takes liberties of expedience but that aside, I wonder whether the second half of the series can manage the aftermath of broken confidences. We watch the circle of women waver or enforce Capote's ostracization, for the sake of pity or their own healing, but his challenge is to make amends, not to absorb or understand the consequences, some of which are tragic. Partly this is down to his being drunk and/or entangled in an abusive relationship, but I wonder if conscience over the destruction of anything beyond his own talent will find its way to the surface of all the conversation. Of course, real life, such as it is rendered in dramatic form, rarely gives us satisfying endings or epiphanies that stick. But Capote vs. The Swans does give us questions about forgiveness and whom it serves, and it does so with style. TVMA. HULU.

Jennifer Fumiko Cahill (she/her) is the arts and features editor at the Journal. Reach her at (707) 442-1400, extension 320, or [email protected]. Follow her on Instagram @JFumikoCahill.

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