The thing about the Friday the 13th movies are they're not very good. Nightmare on Elm Street has innovative effects, Halloween pivots off the expert tension of director John Carpenter. But the first entry in the Friday the 13th franchise is mostly inert. It isn’t until later entries that it amps up the thrills and chills, realizing that the hockey-masked Jason is a ridiculous immortal slasher/wrestler in a funny way, rather than a scary way.

So, if you’re a high-end studio like A24, how do you build an entire eight-episode season of television as a prequel? You focus on the one element of the original movie that totally works: Betsy Palmer’s bonkers turn as Mrs. Pamela Voorhees. And thankfully, they found the perfect modern actress to play the iconic killer lunch-lady in Linda Cardellini.

Unfortunately, like the movie that came before it, that’s pretty much all that works about the meandering, mostly scare-free Friday the 13th prequel, which debuts after an extremely long and messy development and production process. Fans tuning in to see the lurid sex and violence of the best of Friday the 13th (it’s a sleepover/drive-in classic for a reason) will mostly be frustrated at the lack of the former (there’s almost no nudity, and relatively chaste soap opera-level sex), and put off by the latter, which relies heavily on digital trickery and the same sort of faces getting torn off in gruesome ways, episode after episode.

Even worse, some big swings that completely change the mythology and continuity of the film series seem entirely misguided.

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