Mary-Louise Parker in Amazon Civil War Series

There’s the sort of artistic failure that can only be made by incredibly talented people — misfires, but misfires of audacity and ambition, unsuccessful attempts to buck conventional wisdom or smash through stylistic constraints.

I always try to give some grace to failures of that sort, because the difference between greatness and well-intended awfulness can be an eyelash.

Amazon’s new eight-part Civil War miniseries The Gray House does not lack for talent. The series’ co-writers/co-creators include Leslie Greif (the solid Hatfields & McCoys) and John freakin’ Sayles, while each episode was directed by Roland Joffé, who earned Oscar nominations for The Killing Fields and The Mission, his first two features. Kevin Costner is an executive producer, while Morgan Freeman is an executive producer and sporadically narrates.

The Gray House is not, however, the sort of artistic failure that can only be made by incredibly talented people. It’s just a throwback mess, half endeavoring to tell the under-appreciated story of the Southern women and Blacks who risked their lives to assist the Union cause in the Civil War, and half a hodge-podge of caricatures and stereotypes that go back centuries. There’s no aesthetic excellence or narrative complexity to add value, and while several of the performances are sturdy, many more are underdeveloped at one end of the spectrum or ridiculously hammy at the other.

At best, it’s a dry, poorly edited, questionably acted Wikipedia entry in which most of the facts contain the qualifier, “This information cannot be verified.” At worst, it’s an accidental episode of Drunk History, particularly the finale, which I found to be shockingly and hilariously shoddy at every overextended turn.

There is a kernel of a true story at the heart of The Gray House, which is credited in totality to Greif and Darrell Fetty and Sayles in a way that left me with very large questions regarding the precise nature of the Eight Men Out auteur’s contributions.

Eliza (Mary-Louise Parker) and Elizabeth (Daisy Head) Van Lew are Richmond social royalty, as tensions with the North are ramping up in July 1860. The family has a vast estate financed by Eliza’s late husband’s hardware business and populated by servants whom the husband freed on his deathbed. That Eliza and Elizabeth currently own no slaves makes it possible to root for them, and the show definitely doesn’t want you to think that they’re remaining in a house and lifestyle that was supported on the back of slavery.

When the story begins, Mary Jane (Amethyst Davis), one of those paid servants who definitely isn’t a slave, is returning from Liberia, where she was learning about the possibilities for emigrating. After the first episode hints that she’s returning with trauma from that experience, it’s barely mentioned again.

As war breaks out, the Van Lews realize they have an opportunity to help the Northern cause, and they set up a spy network, which includes Mary Jane, their chief porter Isham (Ben Vereen), local prostitute Clara (Hannah James), local baker Thomas McNiven (Christopher McDonald) and a growing assortment of other people.

So far, so accurate!

It’s true that Jefferson Davis (Sam Trammell) took up residence in Richmond at what came to be known as The Gray House; that his Secretary of War/State Judah P. Benjamin (Rob Morrow) was an integral part of the Confederate government; and that the real-life Mary Jane took up work at the Gray House, allowing her to gather and disseminate information in heroic fashion.

So, again, you have a real-life spy ring that was absolutely important to the Union cause, with several details — they utilized a cipher, they often transported documents hidden in eggs — that are part of a historical record. But the historical record is fuzzy, and at almost every turn the writers have decided to latch onto information that, when you Google looking for more depth, is described as “disputed” since nearly everything we know about Mary Jane apparently came from a single, questionably reliable source.

I don’t begrudge printing the legend in cases like this, but for all of the pieces of The Gray House that are real and even the pieces that are embellished, it’s the stuff that’s purely fictional that is just excruciating. Elizabeth finds herself in a chemistry-free romance with a Louisiana gentleman (Colin Morgan’s Hamton) that gets upended because he loves the Confederacy and because Elizabeth’s sister-in-law Laurette (Catherine Hannay) is a predatory cartoon character.

And speaking of predatory cartoon characters, every member of the local Richmond Confederacy has been instructed to act as broadly as possible, including sheriff-or-something Stokely Reeves (Paul Anderson), general nefarious gadfly Bully Lumpkin (Robert Knepper) and a few others. I’m not, by any stretch of the imagination, saying the show needs some nuanced, developed slaveowner characters. I am saying that there’s a point at which Bully Lumpkin is cackling and doing a near-jig — a level of superficiality I can accept from a tertiary henchman, not somebody who is one of the series’ most identifiable adversaries.

Indeed, entirely too many of the supporting performances fall into high-school theatrical Dixie burlesque, with lots of exaggerated Southern accents (plus whatever accent McDonald is doing, which is invisible some moments, full-on-Shrek in others) and, when available, mustache twirling. The various unnamed and barely-named slave characters are, in several cases, basically retrograde archetypes that would have been at home in Gone with the Wind.

Trammell and Morrow aren’t really playing Jefferson Davis and Judah P. Benjamin. I’m not even sure they’re playing Wikipedia entries for either man. Trammell looks almost nothing like Davis, but the hair and makeup team give him the oddly two-pronged beard Davis has in some pictures. Morrow looks nothing like Benjamin and the show does nothing to address that. These two neither look nor sound like real people, but they’re better than the wax-museum replicas of Ulysses S. Grant and Abraham Lincoln who appear in the finale, and better than Charles Craddock’s John Wilkes Booth, who pops up in historically inappropriate times and places as a set-up for…nothing.

There are better performances. If anybody sees the show, it will be a breakout for Davis, whom I remember also being decent in FX’s short-lived attempt to adapt Kindred. I think Mary Jane probably has less screen time than Elizabeth, but she’s the more complicated character; I wish we’d had the chance to see what befell Mary Jane in Liberia. Head is feisty and a bit anachronistic in her affect, but if there’s a high-school theater vibe to the whole show, she gives the impression of being the popular girl who has talent as well. Vereen becomes largely invisible in the second half of the show, but he has one early episode in which the pain and injustice of Isham’s years in slavery come bursting out of him in searing monologues, and it’s hard not to be like, “Oh right. Ben Vereen. National treasure.”

And speaking of searing monologues and national treasures, everyone in Hollywood should seek out Keith David‘s agent, who got him a “With” credit for a role — abolitionist Henry H. Garnet — that amounts to exactly one scene, in which he delivers a fiery speech with typical aplomb.

Though I’m certain that Joffé deserves blame for the coaching of the motley cast — it takes effort to steer Parker to a performance this less-than-good — there are moments when his cinematic pedigree comes through and you can see him, for example, getting unexpected depth from the generically verdant Romanian locations. Then again, there are moments in which bad lighting over-exposes the excessively pristine period costumes and slathered-on hair and makeup. There are also at least four key character death scenes that I had to rewind and watch multiple times because the action was so poorly shot and edited together.

The editing. Man. The show is called The Gray House, which doesn’t in any way reflect its focus, but it probably should have been called Appomattox, because it feels like somebody simply surrendered at trying to build any kind of momentum within the show. The first episode, at 81 minutes, is borderline abusive and I nearly quit watching entirely. The middle of the season, in which episodes are still mostly over an hour, moved a bit better. But then the finale really is comical in its haphazard attempt to depict the bedlam of end-of-war Richmond and give “satisfying” resolution to characters — mostly meaning killing off those wicked Confederates in ludicrous and operatic fashion.

I know that sometimes when I write a negative review, people say, “Well now you made me want to watch!” This is a negative review and I’d urge restraint. If you want a Civil War resistance thriller, watch WGN’s Underground, now streaming on Hulu. If you want a little more Civil War history with a few fictional leaps and far better production values, watch Manhunt on Apple. And if what you really crave is an overpriced, 66-minute Drunk History episode, skip straight to the Gray House finale. You may not get the context, but you’ll still find things to laugh at.