The response to the new Netflix series Ripley, the latest adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s extraordinary novel The Talented Mr Ripley (1955), is already sharply polarizing. Critics are either raving that it’s a work of genius and the best thing on television or dismissing it as a pretentious snore.

In the first episode, enraptured by the lustrous black-and-white cinematography, I thought I’d be in the first camp. But it didn’t take long until I’d shifted over to join the naysayers, watching the rest of the series with brooding impatience. Maybe I wouldn’t go as far as Mick LaSalle, film critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, who marveled, “Writer-director Steven Zaillian made a series of decisions in creating his eight-part Netflix series, ‘Ripley,’ and every one of those decisions was wrong.”

But I’d certainly argue that Zaillian, best known as the screenwriter of many big films like Schindler’s List, Moneyball, Awakenings, Gangs of New York, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, and The Irishman, as well as HBO’s The Night Of, has made one of those slow, static, deadening high-production-value works that wow the prestige TV snobs but leave the rest of us cold.