The opening credits sequence of Tell Me a Story (premiering Oct. 31 on CBS All Access) is a lush, painterly animated depiction of fairy tale characters in dark, dangerous settings, promising a show that reinterprets timeless stories with a modern edge. Aside from that intro, though, there’s virtually nothing in the show itself to indicate that it’s inspired by fairy tales, or really by anything at all. Kevin Williamson’s dark drama is an inexplicable morass of loosely intersecting storylines about irritating people making poor decisions, delivered with completely unearned self-seriousness.

Unlike Bill Willingham’s Vertigo series Fables (which has yet to get a TV adaptation, even while this nonsense makes it to screens) or ABC’s long-running Once Upon a Time, Story doesn’t feature actual fairy tale characters interacting with the modern world. Instead, some of its characters are very, very loosely modeled on well-known figures from fairy tales, in the sense that, say, teen bad girl Kayla (Danielle Campbell) almost wears a red hooded jacket one time and also has a grandmother. Kayla is the Red Riding Hood figure here, then, and the Three Little Pigs show up in the form of three criminals who wear pig masks while committing armed robbery (the masks are then discarded and become irrelevant). And there are a pair of siblings whose names almost sound like Hansel and Gretel (or at least start with the same letters).

Those flimsy connections aside, Story doesn’t have anything to say about modern myths or even about telling stories. There are no meta narrative touches to the various threads, which follow the tired “everything is connected” structure of far too many somber, self-righteous movies and TV series. Kayla lives with her chef dad Tim (Sam Jaeger) and her cool grandmother Colleen (Kim Cattrall) after moving cross country from Oakland to New York City, and she’s having an affair with her hot English teacher Nick (Billy Magnussen) in a gender-reversed retread of a storyline from the first season of Williamson’s breakthrough series Dawson’s Creek.

The three pig-masked robbers include brothers Mitch (Michael Raymond-James, who got to play an actual fairy tale character on Once Upon a Time), the responsible one, and Eddie (Paul Wesley), the screw-up, but nobody shows up to blow their houses down. Maybe Nick, with his connection to the hoodie-clad Kayla, is the Big Bad Wolf? Or maybe it’s Jordan (James Wolk), whose fiancée is killed in the robbers’ jewelry store heist gone wrong and who sets out for revenge? Or maybe it’s Williamson, for inflicting this turgid nonsense on the audience.

NEXT PAGE: Tell Me a Story Smolders in Its Own Total Lack of Levity

The Hansel and Gretel figures are combat veteran Hannah (Dania Ramirez) and jittery go-go dancer Gabe (Davi Santos), and the only dangerous sweets they encounter are the drugs that Gabe likes to take with his roommate. Those drugs lead him to a hotel room where he accidentally causes the death of an older man who may have ties to organized crime, although there’s nothing to indicate that the guy was actually a witch with a habit of cooking and eating children.

The various storylines are all crime-adjacent, but Story isn’t exactly a crime drama, even though one of the series regulars is a police detective who shows up in the second episode to investigate the jewelry store robbery. It’s hard to tell what the point of any of the storylines is meant to be, since they don’t follow the structures of the fairy tales that supposedly inspired them, and there aren’t any mysteries to be solved or any compelling relationships to be explored. The first episode features a distracting amount of politically charged dialogue about Donald Trump and some of his policies, which not only already sounds outdated thanks to the lightning-fast news cycle of 2018, but is also completely abandoned by the second episode.

Director Liz Friedlander (who helmed the two episodes available for review) seems to have given the actors only one instruction -- to smolder as much as possible -- and the show takes advantage of its position on a streaming service by featuring lots of swearing and gratuitous shots of naked backsides. Williamson was once known for the clever, quippy, self-aware dialogue of the Scream movies and Dawson’s Creek, but Story is more in line with his laughably grim Fox serial killer series The Following and short-lived CBS police procedural, Stalker. There’s almost no humor in Story, but there’s also almost no suspense or excitement. The dialogue is florid and overheated without being smart or engaging.

Based on a Mexican format that took more of an anthology approach, Story could have updated classic tales for the present day without draining all the allegorical resonance from them, but instead it seems almost ashamed to be associated with fairy tales at all. With eight more episodes left in the first season beyond the two sent out to critics, there’s still time for a wizard or an evil queen to swoop in and save this mess, but the prospect of a happy ending isn’t looking too strong.