In the world of politics, there's a tendency to keep blaming the previous lot for as long as you can get away with. Joe Biden will undoubtedly be cut a certain level of slack for the multiple sins of the last guy, while Keir Starmer's devotees can only point fingers at Corbyn and Momentum for a finite amount of time before it starts to sound truly lame. When it comes to cultural artefacts, bucks may be passed around when an artistic endeavour flops, but generally when someone has the role of creator-writer-director, it's not a great leap to see where the critical hammer should fall.

And yet The Nevers, a much-vaunted Victorian fantasy drama, throws up something of a dilemma. When its mastermind Joss Whedon departed the project late last year after accusations of his previous bad behaviour on sets stretching as far back as '90s icon Buffy, showrunner duties were handed over to Philippa Goslett. It's unclear exactly what stage the production sat in the filming and editing stages, but the piece that has arrived on screen is nothing short of a flailing mess.

In 19th century London, a number of women and girls ('The Touched') have attained supernatural powers which veer wildly in degrees of usefulness from being ten-foot tall, speaking in various foreign tongues, making objects float, and seeing brief flashes into the future. This is the skill acquired by lead character Amalia True (Laura Donnelly) who is seriously perturbed by these visions (they never involve her doing something charming such as watering flowers or shopping for veils, but are exclusively terrifying images that shock her for a second before dissolving). Her inventor sidekick Penance Adair (Ann Skelly) has the uncanny ability to sense electricity and is a whizz at driving around in a steampunk motor car straight out of Wacky Races.

Inevitably, an array of baddies are keen to control these women including nasty piece of establishment work Lord Massen (Pip Torrens), street thug The Beggar King (Nick Frost), and a cockney copper (Ben Chaplin), while there's a murderous villain on the loose in the shape of serial killer Maladie (Amy Manson). The scene where this blood-stained femme fatale holds a packed theatre hostage should be chilling, but she delivers some kind of a doom-laden speech which is unutterably incomprehensible, even on a second viewing.

The Nevers has been split into two separate runs of six episodes, with the bean-counters presumably awaiting the verdict on this first half dozen before deciding whether to run with it any further. With the current critical and social media consensus suggesting that this is a total blow-out, you might have to rely on Amalia's future-seeing powers in order to glimpse how it all turns out.

Sky Atlantic, Mondays, 9pm; all episodes available now on NOW TV.