It would have been hard to guess at the time that 2013’s mediocre home-invasion thriller The Purge would end up spawning one of the most successful sci-fi/horror franchises of the last decade, but clearly series creator James DeMonaco had a lot more ideas in mind than that first film indicated. The new Purge TV series on USA (premiering September 4) threatens to stretch those ideas further than they can handle, though, with the story of what happens on the one night a year when all crime is legal expanded into 10 episodes, rather than a single feature film.

The basic set-up remains the same: In the United States of the future, a political party called the New Founding Fathers of America has risen to power. As part of the group's rule, it declares that the country must cleanse itself once a year with a 12-hour period in which lawlessness is embraced and encouraged. Created once again by DeMonaco (who wrote all four Purge movies, and directed the first three), the show features four main plot threads that will inevitably intersect over time.

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The one that most closely resembles the working-class stories of the recent Purge movies stars Gabriel Chavarria as Miguel, who lost his parents back in the first Purge (a more contained experiment that took place on Staten Island before the launch of the nationwide mandate, as depicted in the movie The First Purge from earlier this year) and has just been discharged from a stint in the Marines. He’s determined to track down his sister Penelope (Jessica Garza), who’s left a rehab facility without telling anyone where she’s going.

It turns out that Penelope has joined a sort of Purge-worshiping cult, led by a creepy guru known only as Good Leader (Fiona Dourif), who encourages her followers to offer themselves up as sacrifices for people participating in the Purge. The cult is one of a handful of clever variations that the show offers up in its first three episodes, and continuing to expand the franchise’s universe is really the only way that a series like this can work in the long term (although at this point it’s billed as a limited “event series”).

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The other two storylines are less promising so far, despite also examining new and different aspects of the Purge phenomenon. Departing from the focus on the urban poor, one plot thread takes place at an NFFA-sponsored Purge party, featuring people from the same social class as the main characters from the first Purge movie (the wealthy who can afford to insulate themselves from the violence, or at least attempt to). There, married couple Rick (Colin Woodell) and Jenna (Hannah Emily Anderson) plan to entice rich investors to their real-estate development company, which builds housing in neglected areas of the city and gives 20 percent of its proceeds back to the community. But it’s impossible for them to mingle with the Purge-enabling elite and not get caught up in their power games.

Across town in a corporate office, finance executive Jane (Amanda Warren) works during the Purge because her latest deal depends on foreign markets that don’t suspend business during the homicidal annual event (which comes off as a pretty flimsy plot device). Her main motivation, though, is taking out her smarmy, sexual-harassing boss (William Baldwin, always great at playing a smarmy sexual harasser) by hiring a “Purge assassin,” a professional killer who takes money to do someone else’s dirty work during the Purge. The assassin’s insistence on not exchanging money until after the Purge alarms have gone off shows some smart thinking about the logistics of the series’ high concept.

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But too often DeMonaco and the show’s other creators just go for the obvious, relying mainly on the same elements that have driven the Purge movies. Those movies have all been very successful, so it’s hard to blame the producers for sticking to what works, but there isn’t much thrill left in seeing menacing thugs in creepy-looking masks roaming the streets with guns and baseball bats. Even with relaxed cable standards, the violence is toned down from the R-rated movies, and it shows up less frequently, since most of the characters need to survive until the next episode in order to keep the series going.

Purge fans will still probably find enough to like here, and while the acting is variable (Warren is pretty stiff as the guilt-ridden corporate executive), there are some effective performances. Dourif (daughter of genre icon Brad Dourif) is extremely creepy as the monomaniacal cult leader, and Lee Tergesen makes a strong impression with just a handful of scenes so far as a masked Purge avenger who might be this universe’s version of the Punisher. The slower pace means that some of the more intriguing threads may get a chance to develop further as the series goes on, and as DeMonaco has proved with the previous Purge movies, there are a lot of avenues left to explore within this world. For now, though, the series hasn’t taken full advantage of those opportunities.