Patrick Melrose begins in 1982, in London, when Patrick (Benedict Cumberbatch) answers a ringing telephone to learn that his father has died. Immediately, it’s apparent that something is off. Patrick conducts the conversation as if he is underwater. Director Edward Berger’s lens indifferently tracks his striped-shirted torso, his hand, then the top of his short-cropped head as Patrick struggles to keep himself upright. The camera’s heavy apparatus droops and nods uncontrollably, swaying back and forth in an effort to keep Patrick in frame. Finally, the contents of the call tumble out of the phone and into Patrick’s brain, and he bends over. We think he’s wracked with grief—but instead, he picks up a syringe.

Since Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater vaulted him into the English canon in 1821—and certainly since beat writer William S. Burroughs’s Junky, in 1953—literature has seen no shortage of addiction sagas. Patrick Melrose, a five-part miniseries debuting on Showtime May 12, is based on one of them; the show is adapted from a series of novels by Edward St. Aubyn, in which Patrick serves as the author’s stand-in for his own struggles with heroin, his abusive father, and the privileged but isolating world he was born into. At the height of his addiction, which stemmed from repeated, harrowing childhood trauma, he was going through $5,000 worth of drugs a week.

But instead of dwelling on the height of addiction, the astonishingly vulnerable, raw Patrick Melrose is largely committed to exploring the duller but more important work of recovery. As St. Aubyn told The New Yorker in 2014, the books track Patrick as he tries to move forward from addiction “with dignity, from an impossible assault on dignity.” His books, the first of which was published in 1992, have since won a cult following—which counts among its ranks none other than Cumberbatch himself. Cumberbatch has said that his only two bucket-list roles are Hamlet and Patrick Melrose. (Cumberbatch played the Danish prince at the Barbican in London in 2015.) Shortly afterward, producers Michael Jackson and Rachael Horovitz reached out to Cumberbatch about this adaptation of St. Aubyn’s work. Cumberbatch signed on to both play the titular role and to executive-produce the miniseries.

Actors’ pet projects aren’t often known for their elegance; the news that Cumberbatch sought out the part could have suggested that Patrick Melrose would be an amalgam of carefully positioned Emmy reels. It’s true that the series is a smorgasbord of acting opportunities—especially in its first installment, “Bad News,” in which Patrick is under the influence of heroin, cocaine, quaaludes, amphetamines, and alcohol, alternately and all together.

But either Patrick Melrose is more than an actor’s showcase, or Cumberbatch is just that good in the role—or both. The show is a finely cut gem, both technically and tonally; it may be Cumberbatch’s strongest work to date. He’s usually drawn to cerebral roles—Sherlock Holmes, Dr. Stephen Strange, Alan Turing—but in Patrick Melrose, the protagonist’s intellectual retreat masks a sensitive, emotional journey that Cumberbatch winningly pursues. The first, rip-roaring episode is both a horrifying descent into drug-induced madness and a sharply funny examination of a drug addict’s foibles and excuses. Patrick has scads of money, so when he goes to New York to claim his father’s remains, he does so in alarmingly expensive style—tipping everyone he meets with wads of cash, before settling into a multi-room suite complete with a turquoise bathtub. The show has a lot of fun with its protagonist’s weaknesses and, at first, Cumberbatch exercises his fussy Sherlock sensibilities to excellent effect, playing Patrick’s quirks as simultaneously irrefutable and ridiculous. But then the romp turns into a nightmare, as Patrick’s attempts to find heroin in an unfamiliar city become increasingly desperate.

It’s rare to see the fantasy of money, luxury, and access so pitilessly reduced to a hollow, empty loneliness, especially in a story about addiction. While there are standout examples—like Darren Aronofsky’s disorienting, eye-opening Requiem for a Dream, or the achingly beautiful narratives of animated animal-people addicts in BoJack Horseman—sagas like this one usually work better on the page than on the screen; the brief gloss of film can make drug use seem rather too appealing, while the idea of spending eight TV seasons with an addict seems rather unappealing.

But Patrick Melrose carries off a difficult task because it finds an exceptional sweet spot. Anchored by Cumberbatch’s performance, the miniseries is remarkably neither too long nor too short. Each hour-long installment adapts one of St. Aubyn’s novels, and follows the conceit of the books in telling Patrick’s story by illustrating one day at a time, sometimes years and continents apart from each other. (That this economy of storytelling emerged out of peak TV seems impossible; at Netflix, the Melrose books would have been adapted as a five-season-long procedural.)

Under the aegis of novelist and screenwriter David Nicholls, each installment takes on a different style and tone, too. It’s a delicate balance of subject matter and style; a drug binge in 1982 is quite different from a horrific trauma in 1967. But Patrick Melrose strikes a gorgeous pose, both within each richly considered chapter and among the chapters considered as a whole. The episodes inform each other, but in unexpectedly complex ways; a scene remembered one way, in 1982, takes on a different angle in 1990. Certain details jump to life in 1967, and then are buried until 1990. With delicate touches of overarching coherence, these disparate parts are nudged together into a multi-layered whole. The series is a corrective for what ails much television today; it’s taut, thoughtful, and complete, with almost no wasted space .

And perhaps because it is so well constructed, Patrick Melrose almost invites the viewer to see right through it. Patrick is fabulously wealthy; his father, David (Hugo Weaving—brilliantly, fabulously awful), is a minor aristocrat, while his mother (Jennifer Jason Leigh) is an heiress. It’s a stylish period piece, but it’s not a particularly nostalgic one. In flashbacks to his youth, the elder Melrose rules his household with an iron grip of control and fear—and the rest of the world, from his chortling pals smoking cigars to his drunk wife Eleanor, freely and blatantly let him get away with it. There’s a keen, biting edge to these crystalline recollections; by the third episode, “Some Hope,” which takes place in a labyrinthine mansion during a country aristocrat’s party, Patrick Melrose is turning the refined and dazzling world of British peerage on its ear.

The effect is not of a bull in a china shop, or of peasants storming the Bastille. Instead, it is a distracted unearthing, as if the high-strung protagonist has overturned the noble trappings of his childhood because he is searching for something beneath. It’s a restrained gesture, and mostly gentle, as befits a man so terrified of encountering the world sober that he ingests any drug he can find. But his spirit is still caustic enough to dislodge the baubles and bits of glass that embellish wealth, to shake off the trappings of class to reveal the creatures who dwell within. Unadorned, and naked, their frailty is blinding. Patrick Melrose invites the viewer to strip away illusions, as he does—to meditate, with him, on what it means to try to be better.