The eight-episode season — the first in an anthology series — kicks off in the early ’60s. Crawford (Jessica Lange) is pounding martinis at the Beverly Hilton as she watches Marilyn Monroe accept a Golden Globe. She grimaces at Hollywood’s new young thing as if staring at the ice floe she’ll be pushed out to sea on. (Among the roles Crawford, in her 50s, is being offered: Elvis’s grandmother.)

Not ready to be set adrift, Crawford finds herself the script for “Baby Jane.” She enlists her longtime rival Davis (Susan Sarandon), a committed but difficult artist now doing theater. And she signs up Robert Aldrich (Alfred Molina), a sad-sack journeyman director with higher ambitions.

“Baby Jane” — which, spoiler alert, became a hit — was a horror-thriller about a deadly struggle between two faded-actress sisters. The violence in “Feud” is (mostly) psychological. But as Crawford sees Davis stealing the picture in the showy role of a deranged ex-child-star, the stakes become just as high. Both actresses view the film as a lifeboat with only one seat.

They’re not wrong. They’re fighting in a pit that others have constructed. The gossip rags thrive on infighting. “There’s only room for one goddess at a time,” says the columnist Hedda Hopper (Judy Davis, in a feather-brimmed hat that makes her look like a rapacious egret). The world sees them as old bitches who — as Davis’s daughter, B. D. (Kiernan Shipka), puts it — refuse to give up their “turn.”