The New Look, a ten-episode series currently running on Apple TV+, is such a dull muddle it’s bewildering, considering the lurid and dramatic potential of the material. The narrative is framed by the 1947 feud between two major fashion designers, Christian Dior and Coco Chanel, that’s rooted in their contrasting experiences surviving the Nazi occupation of France during WWII.

Fashion designer feud? Legendary era of haute couture? Nazi-occupied Paris? How can you make that boring?

Well, writer-director-producer Todd A. Kessler (The Sopranos) has done it. The actors seem trapped in gradually hardening cement, trying to bring the thing to life. Poor Australian actor Ben Mendelsohn, who’s playing Dior, is fifty-four years old, older than Dior was when he died at age fifty-two in 1957, and he looks every day of it. Similarly aged-upward is the character of the prominent couturier Lucien Lelong, played by John Malkovich looking ancient and ravaged in pancake makeup. Lelong gets through the war by wrangling commissions from prominent Nazis for the designers who toil for him. Nazis are the only ones who can afford designer clothes in the conditions of widespread privation in occupied France.