Ryan Murphy’s new five-episode Netflix series Halston stars Ewan McGregor as the pioneering designer who built a spectacular fashion empire in the 1970s and ’80s, then lost it all in an equally spectacular manner. If you watch it, you’ll bless McGregor and curse Ryan Murphy, the producer and cowriter of several episodes.

Murphy’s credits as TV series creator/writer/director/producer include Nip/Tuck, Glee, American Horror Story, Feud: Bette and Joan, Pose, Ratched, and Hollywood, and as film director, Running with Scissors, Eat Pray Love, The Normal Heart, and The Prom. His series generally tend to have intriguing premises, high production values, very bright, very glossy looks, and at least one excellent lead performance. And a few are genuinely engaging — I was completely hooked by Feud, about the rivalry between Joan Crawford and Bette Davis, whereas his more recent series Hollywood is among the most appalling things I’ve ever tried to sit through.

Murphy’s got a tendency to torpedo his own shows by going for eye candy and brain death, flattening out any intriguing spikiness by staying relentlessly in the shallow end of the pool. He favors a simplistic identity politics progressivism that is weirdly inconsistent. Halston is Exhibit A in this regard. Murphy got into hot water for casting heterosexual actor McGregor to play a famous gay man, but there’s a bizarre oversight within the script that’s harder to understand. It leaves out entirely an important aspect of Halston’s career: he was innovative in hiring many black models, a number of whom he discovered himself as he moved around New York City, at a time when only a few women of color were regularly employed in the American fashion industry.