A telephone rings offscreen before the first shot reveals it and a man standing over it. It’s Patrick Melrose (Benedict Cumberbatch), and he appears out of sorts when the voice on the other line tells him that his father has died. “Must come as an awful shock to you,” the caller says, to which Melrose responds, “Something like that, yes.” Viewers won’t entirely understand what is happening in the opening moments of Bad News, the first episode of Showtime and Sky Atlantic’s Patrick Melrose miniseries, and that’s perfectly fine.

The now-fatherless son goes to take a seat in a nearby chair, perhaps to avoid falling to his knees in grief. Instead of displaying any of the emotions such news generally elicits, however, the seemingly dazed Melrose notices something on the floor and goes to pick it up. It’s a used needle, and when he stands again, the camera reveals a small spot of blood on the elbow of his shirt, where he had pricked himself for a high moments earlier. Melrose is not affected by his father’s death, nor anything else for that matter. It’s simply the heroin kicking in.

Much like this scene, the Cumberbatch-led adaptation of British author Edward St Aubyn’s acclaimed novels is more of a slow burn than anything. Each of the five episodes, three of which this reviewer has watched, are based on one of the five Patrick Melrose novels. St Aubryn based the series on his own life growing up in, and out of, a highly dysfunctional upper-class British family. The method of adaptation may seem like a cheat of sorts, as each episode clocks in at an hour, while each book consists of hundreds of pages, but writer David Nicholls and director Edward Berger manage to retain the story’s purposefully stifled pacing.

Along with the performances by Cumberbatch and the other actors, including Hugo Weaving as Patrick’s tyrannical father David and Jennifer Jason Leigh as his oft-absent mother Eleanor, Nicholls and Berger also craft a darkly comic story relying just as much on visuals as language. Of course, Cumberbatch’s Melrose shines brightly even when he’s talking to himself (as he does throughout Bad News), but he also rises to the occasion (despite, or because of, his high) when he stumbles into the wrong parlor at a mortuary.