The Betrayal That Rocked Park Avenue

Truman Capote's fall from grace gets the Ryan Murphy treatment.

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IT'S AN ACHIEVEMENT of sorts to make one of Truman Capote's most infamous society stunts seem boring. Feud: Capote vs. the Swans devotes a flashback episode to Capote's 1966 Black and White Ball at the Plaza hotel, where the invitees wore masks, the tablecloths were red, and the guest list included everyone from Andy Warhol to Lynda Bird Johnson. It was the high-water mark for a certain type of American excess, a time when the outrageous and aristocratic all got stuffed into the same blender of celebrity. Feud tackles the spectacle through a faux black-and-white documentary in which Capote, played by Tom Hollander, primps for the ball while stringing along his clique of high society ladies with the promise that one will be the guest of honor.

The show delivers on the cattiness and the glamour and the factoids, such as Capote serving everyone spaghetti and chicken hash with Champagne, but misses deeper insight into why Capote's guest list was revolutionary or how society was shifting. Feud chooses easier themes: Capote is haunted by the ghost of his mother (Jessica Lange), who monologues in an obvious drawl about her class resentment. (No more storytelling by way of ghosts, please!) The fact that Capote's guest of honor would actually be Katharine Graham, and not one of his Swans, is introduced as an afterthought. (You have to do your own research to learn more about the publisher of the Washington Post.) Seven years after Feud's first season, which tepidly reheated the fights between Joan Crawford and Bette Davis, Ryan Murphy's anthology series returns to depict a more conceptual battle.