Kirsten Dunst works hard to carry “On Becoming a God in Central Florida,” a series that passed through the hands of AMC and YouTube Premium before arriving at Showtime, where it premieres on Sunday. Like the desperate disciples of the show’s cultlike merchandising pyramid scheme, she has to move a lot of product in the course of the show’s first season, and most of it is substandard.

Dunst plays Krystal Stubbs , resident of an “Orlando-adjacent” Florida town in 1992, who works at a water park while her husband ( Alexander Skarsgard ) sells insurance by day and at night recruits new distributors for Founders American Merchandise, a spuriously patriotic enterprise fueled by ever-expanding purchases of paper goods and cleaning supplies.

FAM — it’s your real family! — is literally and figuratively all-consuming, and early on it upends Krystal’s life. (The crucial moment is one of the show’s few dips into true Florida gothic.) Falling from lower-middle-class anxiety to the brink of bankruptcy, she vows to fight back, and the season is a dark-comic account of her battle to regain solvency and extract a measure of revenge. FAM’s exhortations include the question, “Are you the man who takes the control?,” and Krystal, with her mulish, small-minded, amoral determination to win at any cost, is that man.

“On Becoming a God” has some big if not very original ideas on its mind, beginning with its equation of the American dream to a get-rich-quick marketing scam in which the goal is maximum reward for minimum work and job stands for “just over broke.” And entwined with FAM’s nationalism is a revival-meeting-style religiosity designed to render infallible the pronouncements of the scheme’s founder, a white-maned patriarch with the flamboyant name Obie Garbeau II (Ted Levine).