A potentially good project that falls flat: Alias Grace

I suppose the Sarah Polley six-part Netflix series Alias Grace, based on Margaret Atwood's novel, which in turn is based on historical fact, is watchable - I watched it, anyway - if you can take six hours of all men are horrible (w/ one exception, and he's a complete weirdo) and all women are victims. Maybe that's true; anyway, that's not what bothered me. Mostly, this could have been a taut and provocative series about a 19th-century Canadian murder case - the eponymous Grace, along with a fellow servant (a guy) were charged w/ murdering their boss and his head servant; the man was hanged and Grace sentenced to life in an asylum, where she is horribly mistreated. A group of benevolent Canadian church folks took up her cause and invited an American doctor, one of the first to treat mental illnesses, to come to Kingston, Ont., to treat Grace; he does so through a series of interviews in which she is supposed to live through and narrate the events of the crime. This is something like a 19th-c version of Mindhunters, but w/out the drama. In effect, we go up to the 5th episode/hour before Grace even begins to talk about the crime; do we really need that much information on the hardships she endured and the system of domestic servitude? Things pick up a bit in the final two episodes, but things also get obscured rather than clarified: Grace undergoes hypnosis and gives a completely different account of the murders, and in the end we never know to what extent she lies, hallucinates, distorts, suppresses, or tells the truth. Essentially, this series is a literary adaptation that's far too dependent on the source text - there are far too many scenes in which we get long voice-overs from Grace or long passages of her discussion w/ the interviewing doctor and almost nothing of interest happening on screen - it's like a reading from a novel at times, in other words. Polley has done some great work (e.g., her documentary/memoir The Stories We Tell), so it's especially disappointing that this potentially good project should fall flat.