YMMV / Feud

• Aluminum Christmas Trees:
  • Joan Crawford really did find out that she'd been recast in Hush... Hush, Sweet Charlotte by hearing it on the radio.
  • Bette's Baby Jane wig really was one that Joan Crawford had worn in an earlier film.
  • Mamacita's nickname is real. The story goes that around the time she was first hired, Joan had recently done work in Brazil, and she went to call for her, forgot her name, and ended up calling her Mamacita instead. The nickname simply stuck after that.
• Creator's Pet: Jessica Lange's Joan had more overall screentime than Susan Sarandon's Bette, ostensibly due to her gainful working relationship with Ryan Murphy, which made some observe that the show could have just been a Joan Crawford docudrama. Sarandon nearly became a supporting player, although she started as a co-lead. This was most likely due to the series portraying Crawford as more of a catalyst for the rivalry than Davis. This, coupled with Joan's arguably more tragic final years, naturally led to a more singular focus on the character. Not helping matters is that the show employs heavy use of Artistic Licence – History to make Joan look more sympathetic, and Bette more antagonistic.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Joan's sardonic, largely sullen maid Mamacita is surprisingly popular with the fanbase, largely for her no-nonsense attitude.
• Harsher in Hindsight: Bette's statement in the pilot episode "this is not a Joan Crawford picture" is oddly prophetic of how the series would focus more on Joan than Bette.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • A key point of tension in the feud is that Bette Davis has won two Oscars to Joan Crawford's one. However, in actuality the situation was reversed at the time the series aired - with Susan Sarandon having one Oscar and Jessica Lange having two.
  • Joan's questioning of Price Waterhouse's tabulations for Best Actress is especially ironic considering the Best Picture fiasco that happened not long before the series premiered (keep in mind that this was filmed well before that happened). The portrayal of Faye Dunaway in the season finale also calls the incident to mind, since Dunaway served as co-presenter of the award and compounded PW's mistake by reading the card without checking.
• Hollywood Homely: Bette. She is now considered one of the great cinematic beauties of her generation (granted, when she was younger), but Jack Warner claims he wouldn't want to fuck her back when she did her screen test. While she didn't age especially well by The '60s, she was hardly as homely as made out, and with the casting of Susan Sarandon as Bette, this is less believable.
• Les Yay: In this series' version of events, Mamacita acts very much like Joan Crawford's long-suffering, much-abused lover rather than simply her maid.
• Magnificent Bitch: Joan Crawford, in spades. Even in her first full scene in the pilot, we see she is willing to be a chess player in order to benefit her career. She works with Hedda Hopper on a semi-consistent basis to get herself portrayed more positively than Bette during the film of Baby Jane and even instigates a cat fight in the papers by calling up Luella Parsons when Hedda publishes an insult Bette allegedly made about her falsies (but unbeknownst to her, that was disclosed by Bob Aldridge to get the movie more free press.) She and Bette only team up enough to get rid of the actress Bob initially picks for the part of the neighbor girl and every other time, they're at each other's throats physically or through spreading rumors. She tries to manipulate Bob on her side, but he's aware that she's just trying to control him and doesn't fall for it, despite her attempts. She also is about to pay off her shitty half-brother when he threatens to blackmail her with a possible stag film she did once and stops payment after he kicks the bucket since now there is no threat of her possible stag film being released. She and Hedda scheme and spread enough dirt that it possibly costs Bette her last possible Oscar win and it's the final nail in the coffin for Joan's career when she successfully shows up Bette by accepting Anne Bancroft's Oscar on stage.
  • Hedda Hopper is as scheming as Joan, if not more. In the series, she's the one who comes up with the idea to show Bette up by accepting the Oscar for her competition, citing Anne Bancroft and Geraldine Paige as the ones who would truly break Bette to lose to. She is happy to work with Joan all buddy-buddy until they are at odds and after they are, she stops at nothing trying to spin a potential story about Joan doing a stag film.
• Moral Event Horizon: Joan hijacking the Oscars and humiliating Bette Davis by accepting the Oscar for Anne Bancroft is one (though the series attempts to justify this by implying that Bancroft, and Geraldine Page as well, only went along with Joan's offer out of pity) - though by the time Joan attempts to kill the film Hush... Hush, Sweet Charlotte, the show doesn't even try and give an out for her behavior.
• Narm: Joan's Big "NO!" when she hears she's been replaced by Olivia de Havilland is unintentionally hilarious, as is the way she throws the vase at Mamacita - and then acts surprised when the maid quits then and there. It has to be said though that Joan Crawford was said to be quite theatrical in her everyday life, so it wouldn't be that much of a stretch if she did act that way at some point.
• One-Scene Wonder: John Waters as William Castle at the beginning of "Hagsploitation."
• Questionable Casting: Catherine Zeta-Jones as Olivia de Havilland is a strange choice. The former has very dark coloring thanks to her distant Greek roots, and in fact is often cast as the Spicy Latina because of it (even though she isn't Latina). Olivia de Havilland however in her youth was fairer with a more down to earth Girl Next Door look. The two actresses simply don't look alike - making it an odd casting decision.
• Retroactive Recognition: Although Kiernan Shipka was known for Mad Men, she'd later be even more famous for headlining Chilling Adventures of Sabrina.
• Squick: No offense to Alfred Molina, but explicitly showing Bob trying to have sex with his wife wasn't exactly the most pleasant sight.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: The series's liberties with history (a lot of which seemed to be done to prop up sympathy for Joan Crawford) got a bit of criticism.
  • Robert Aldrich developed What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? long before Joan Crawford came on board, and she was pretty passive in its pre-production. Bette arguably was more involved - she suggested the black and white cinematography and recommended her old movies for Jane Hudson's bad performances.
  • Portraying many things Bette does as motivated out of sticking it to Joan. For example, in real life she didn't know the wig was from one of Joan's old films (it had been regroomed so no one recognised it) and merely came up with Jane Hudson's make-up inspired by the homeless streetwalkers on Hollywood Boulevard.
  • Downplaying Joan's diva behavior on the set of Hush... Hush, Sweet Charlotte in a clear attempt to make her look more sympathetic. She at one point refused to speak to Robert Aldrich directly and would only communicate through her make-up artist.
  • Bette's husband Gary Merrill (a prolific TV and film actor) is portrayed as a terrible actor. Getting fired from her Broadway play for delivering a emotionless performance.
  • The worst of it is trying to imply that Joan was unfairly villified by her daughter Christina, where a scene has Joan talk to her daughter Cathy and insist that Christina lied with her book Mommie Dearest. She only says she was "perhaps too strict" with her children, which is actually a common abuse tactic in and of itself called Minimizing. Especially short-sighted since the series also highlights that Bette may have been abusive to BD, ignoring that the latter's tell-all book was quickly debunked - and while Mommie Dearest was disputed too, far more sources verified some of Christina's stories.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: They had Susan Sarandon playing Bette Davis, whom the real woman had even given her approval to play her if a biopic was ever made. And rather than make the most of a talented actress playing one herself, they largely relegate Bette to a one-dimensional rival whose main motivation seems to be sticking it to Joan.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Rather than a serious biopic examining the lives and similarities of two of Hollywood's most celebrated female stars, what results is essentially a Draco in Leather Pants Fix Fic for Joan Crawford that's more like a trashy Soap Opera than anything else.
• Wangst: What Joan's most sympathetic moments tend to be, despite stellar acting by Jessica Lange.

---