Todd Haynes’s H.B.O. miniseries Mildred Pierce reintroduces us to two of the most loathsome characters to have ever letched their way across the screen. The first offender is Monty Beragon (Guy Pearce), a well-born weed whose family tree is no longer blooming with legal tender; and the second is Veda Pierce (played by Morgan Turner as a teenager and Evan Rachel Wood as a young adult), less a weed than a thorny rose who thinks her bourgeois roots are too close to the surface. They both divvy up lover/mother Mildred (Kate Winslet) for fertilizer, and share a condoling attitude toward her and everyone else who works to earn their keep. They’re divine-right douche-bags who bite the hand that feeds them, and only to selfish ends. Scratch that. In a movie, they’d bite; in a five-part miniseries, that sprawls across the long and forlorn years of the Great Depression, they nibble.

Fortunately, we viewers at home are treated to a slice of ’30s life as toothsome as one of Mildred’s famous pies; and Haynes gives us enough to gorge on. The truly remarkable thing about this miniseries, which aired between March 27th and April 10th—and which I’ve only of late caught up with—is the way it delves into its period. For me, it was curiously evocative of reading Madame Bovary: It’s that feeling one gets when one senses a modern consciousness narrating its first-hand experience of a long-gone time. And Pierce feels paced to fit the lifestyle of its period. Perhaps what makes it more Madame Bovary than Mad Men, though, is its lack of historical irony. Change isn’t around the corner: Mildred will never become a liberated feminist. (Flaubert had his own brand of irony; and though he kept his distance like Haynes, he was far more aloof.) That the James M. Cain novel, from which the story stems, was published in 1941 surely plays a part in Pierce’s unique sensibility; but the series rises to a level of tact and perception that I assume the book lacks. I assume this because Cain’s plot is a pile of pulp.

There are sundry stories about slavish liaisons with partners who are cruel and destructive and yet tragically irresistible; but Cain applied that familiar tenet of s&m to a mother-daughter relationship. Pierce’s 1945 screen treatment, starring Joan Crawford, was so deeply embedded in Hollywood convention that the movie, viewed today, is little more than floridly terse. Produced by Warner Brothers, it was a “women’s picture” disguised as a noir; it had a melodramatic framing device that Haynes and his co-writers have shorn. But, even with it gone, and with every other element almost infinitely classed up, Haynes still can’t explain away Mildred’s semi-incestuous devotion to a monster that goes for Mother’s jugular at every opportunity, and without hesitation. So Veda’s final insult—staged like a pornographic passage illustrated by Fuseli—seems overdue. If Mildred hasn’t gotten with the program, it’s because she can’t or won’t; and even Winslet’s expressively weather-beaten visage can only vaguely imply that this restaurateur’s motives are anything but maternally altruistic. I’m not asking that this be explicitly hammered out, only that we get a clearer view into what Mildred sees of herself in Veda; we don’t get enough consanguinity. All that the filmmakers could do was build a Fabergé egg around Cain’s hard-boiled yolk.

Granted, I am not a woman or a parent, and, by extension, not a mother—that I’m aware of. But if Haynes were fully successful, I could feel like I was. Thus the series is diminished, but far from destroyed. At its best—as when Mildred interviews to be a rich floozy’s maid—the series is redolent of past injustices: not just against women, but against the lower classes. (And Mildred’s class is high enough to at least upset a limbo stick.) The visual scheme, another gift from cinematographer Edward Lachman, edifies this “class warfare” aspect; his mix of Gordon Willis and Edward Hopper—with its hat-brim shadows and eldritch light sources—helps to endow Old Los Angeles with historical weight: Depressive realism. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this epistle from a straitened time struck Haynes when it did. It is frequently remarked that the gap between rich and poor is at its widest since 1929—and that the disparities are now obfuscated doesn’t mean that they’ve disappeared. In fact, veneration for a de facto aristocracy has, of late, been given economical justifications that are about as scientific as the evidence that this planet is a scant 6,000 years young. Veda Pierce, if she were alive and young today, would not need to be such a snot-nosed poseur; she’d be a reality-show superstar. Such are the advancements of American democracy.

(As much as I hate to get all meta, I was going to enumerate the disparities between reviewing a miniseries like this and a movie in theaters. But who could top an ending like that? Certainly not me. So I’ll just toss in my two cents that moviegoing is the more social experience, and will insist upon arguing the point with anyone who’ll buy a round, and leave it at that for now. In the meantime, I’ll let an old colleague speak for me.)