To watch Apple TV+’s new limited series Disclaimer is to observe the streaming era at its most ambitious and maddening. The show’s creator, Alfonso Cuarón, is the famed cinematic visionary behind such masterworks as Children of Men (2006) and Gravity (2013). Its leading performers, Cate Blanchett and Kevin Kline, are the long-beloved winners of basically every acting award on the planet. By all rights, the new production ought to be one of the high points of the television year, a stylish thriller that spares no expense and shimmers with star power. Yet the series is just plain awful: poorly written, badly acted, and so bizarrely stylized that one fears for Cuarón’s long-term prospects. If Disclaimer is the auteur’s first and presumably best streaming service idea, what viewing horrors might the future hold?

The show tells the story of Catherine Ravenscroft (Blanchett), a renowned documentarian living in London with her husband, Robert (Sacha Baron Cohen), and son, Nicholas (Kodi Smit-McPhee). What appears to be an idyllic existence is interrupted when, one evening, a mysterious post arrives bearing a stranger’s self-published novel. No mere vanity project, the book is instead a recounting of Catherine’s darkest secret: 20 years ago, vacationing abroad, our heroine conducted an affair that ended in tragedy. Who is the novel’s author, and what does he or she want? More importantly, how can Catherine salvage her family when a malevolent antagonist seems intent on exposing her?