As wrongheaded as it is for a Friday the 13th prequel to exist, it feels especially awkward to get one on the heels of Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, which read the entire franchise for filth. A series centered on Jason Voorhee’s homicidal mother, Pamela, in the aftermath of her sweet baby boy’s drowning in Crystal Lake is exactly the kind of thing Dylan Baker’s studio exec in Jane Schoenbrun’s film would’ve greenlit. While Crystal Lake is probably the best-executed possible version of that pitch, that doesn’t make it any less of a bad idea.

Jason’s origin story has been told and retold about as many times as the tale of Bruce Wayne’s parents being shot dead in an alley, but Crystal Lake at least gives us the saddest and most empathetic version of it. At a New Jersey summer camp in the late 1970s, Jason (Callum Vinson)—briefly glimpsed as a normal, big-hearted, curious kid with cranial birth defects—drowns in the titular lake while his mother, Pamela (Linda Cardellini), works in the cafeteria and the camp’s teenage staff are too busy doing each other to do their jobs.

The fact that Jason’s body is never found weighs on Pamela, but Crystal Lake’s other residents callously urge her to move on, oblivious to the potential for further tragedy brewing in plain sight. Specifically, the kind that Pamela and her not-so-dead son will come to unleash.

Cardellini gives a carefully modulated performance as a woman struggling to redirect all the love and parental instincts she’d cultivated over the years after Jason is presumed dead. She’s the walking wounded, and Crystal Lake seems to brush up against every exposed nerve left raw by her loss. She develops an almost suffocating overabundance of protectiveness toward the children around her, and, on the strength of Cardellini’s performance, the way that protectiveness curdles into cold-blooded hatred feels organic, even righteous.

But Cardellini—and, to a slightly lesser extent, William Catlett as Levon, the out-of-his-element Crystal Lake police chief—bring prestige-TV pathos to a series that, in its little goblin heart, never forgets what franchise it belongs to. This is a TV show trying to bring softness, nuance, and social commentary to a universe that mostly demands, as Gillian Anderson’s Billy Presley puts it in Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, “flesh and fluids.”

Crystal Lake delivers when it gets down to bloody business. The town’s populace contains no shortage of sleazy hicks, horny teenagers, and boorish townies who you know have a machete to the face—or much worse—in their immediate futures. But the series never reconciles its appetite for the genre’s gleefully punitive violence with its efforts to elicit sympathy for a grieving mother. For all of Cardellini’s efforts, Crystal Lake is never in danger of getting too real.