In an early scene in the first episode of Homecoming, Amazon’s new psychological thriller series, Julia Roberts walks through a series of rooms, talking rapidly on her phone. It is an important conversation: This is the first time we hear Roberts’s character, a social worker named Heidi Bergman, speaking with her neurotic, overbearing boss Colin Belfast (Bobby Cannavale). But the scene’s main function is to set up a menacing aesthetic: As Heidi walks, the camera reveals the hallways of the Homecoming facility, where she works for Geist, a pharmaceutical conglomerate contracted by the government to treat soldiers returning from combat.

Homecoming has what I can only describe as a “midcentury macabre” look—a sleek, aloof style that signals something is not quite right. The walls are smooth redwood panels with sculptural silver sconces; the couches are low, tufted, and lemon yellow. Each resident at Homecoming has kitschy palm tree-print curtains at his window, an austere writing desk that looks like a secretary’s perch out of Mad Men, and a shiny, squat, mustard-colored desk lamp. Everything inside Homecoming is angular, from the geometric art to the Escheresque wall tiles. Everything is lit like the Valencia filter on Instagram, with a wash of avocado green and a hazy golden glow. Nothing here is comforting.

This is the aesthetic of modern prestige television horror. It keeps popping up again and again: Black Mirror showed us subtle dystopias unfolding in pristine modernist homes, while Mr. Robot offered besuited executives planning the downfall of humanity in slick corporate headquarters. The look clearly references a bygone era—the 1950s, when America’s growing military-industrial bureaucracy provoked fears of surveillance, repression, and a state dangerously empowered by devastating new technologies. But it also pulls from the stylings of Silicon Valley today. With its tasteful, Rothkoesque wall art and quirky geometric touches, the Homecoming facility could pass for any well-funded tech start-up, an incubator of disruption. We are supposed to guess, from all this, that Homecoming is not what it seems. It’s too manicured, too monotone, too minimalist. Something is lurking beneath the tasteful, marbleized surfaces.

This visual style does a lot of work in Homecoming, which is based on a podcast of the same name. The series was podcast network Gimlet Media’s first scripted drama, an all-out effort to demonstrate the medium’s potential for upscale storytelling. To this end, Gimlet stacked the cast with splashy Hollywood talent: Catherine Keener played Heidi, David Schwimmer played Colin, and Oscar Isaac played Walter Cruz, a veteran undergoing treatment at Homecoming. The mystery writer Eli Horowitz and sound mixer Micah Bloomberg wrote the series, which had no narrator and instead presented the story as a set of found audio snippets. Following the story felt like listening in on classified tapes and uncovering a conspiracy: We hear Heidi and Colin discussing dosing and data collection on the phone; we hear recordings of Heidi, years later, working as a waitress; and we fit the pieces together ourselves.

Adapted for television, Homecoming’s narrative plays more like a straightforward drama, and leans heavily on its aesthetic to build tension. In the first episode, Walter (Stephan James) begins his course of therapy with Heidi. He has just returned from a particularly painful tour, on which he lost one of his close friends and fellow soldiers to an IED explosion. Heidi draws Walter out, asking him about his life before joining up and about the jokes he shared in the Army—like the time guys in his unit convinced a soldier named Benji that there was a Titanic sequel called Titanic Rising and made up elaborate plot points. The scene looks like a typical therapy session between a willing patient and a professional who wants to guide him. But as the first episode jumps into the future, we see that just a few years later, everything has gone wrong: Homecoming is closed and classified; Heidi is waitressing at a crab shack, having lost all recollection of the project; and Walter has gone off the grid.