• Courtesy Of Fx
• Naomi Watts shines as fragile diva Babe Paley in a dishy series about Truman Capote and his socialite frenemies.

Truman Capote would have killed on social media. The novelist, journalist and man-about-town understood branding as well as any current celebrity. Capote, who died in 1984, could drop a sick burn on a talk show with aplomb that today's comedians would envy.

And he understood the art of the beef — or, as they called it back then, the feud. That's the subject of this eight-episode FX limited series (streaming on Hulu and Fubo), the follow-up to 2017's "Feud: Bette and Joan."

Largely directed by indie pioneer Gus Van Sant, "Feud: Capote vs. the Swans" is based on Laurence Leamer's book Capote's Woman. Among a slew of star turns, it features the final performance of Treat Williams, who died last June from injuries sustained in a motorcycle accident in Dorset. He plays Bill Paley, famous in his day for building the CBS network — and, by this account, for his philandering.

The deal

In 1966, Capote (Tom Hollander) signed a contract for an unwritten novel called Answered Prayers. Its subject would be New York's high society, of which he had been a fixture since the '50s as the confidant of such socialites as Babe Paley (Naomi Watts), Slim Keith (Diane Lane), C.Z. Guest (Chloë Sevigny) and Lee Radziwill (Calista Flockhart). Impeccably coiffed and coutured and eager for the gossip that Capote could provide like no one else, they are the "Swans" of the title.

But Answered Prayers would never be the great American novel that Capote envisioned — or even a finished one. The same year he signed the contract, his true crime tale In Cold Blood turned him into a household name, and celebrities flocked to his Black and White Ball at the Plaza Hotel.

Increasingly less a creator than a personality, Capote would spend the rest of his life battling writer's block and alcoholism. When excerpts from Answered Prayers appeared in Esquire in 1975, they sparked the outrage of the Swans, whose secrets he had aired in a thinly disguised account. And thus a fashionable feud began.

Will you like it?

Showrunner and playwright Jon Robin Baitz doesn't attempt to give "Feud: Capote vs. the Swans" a standard dramatic arc. Instead, he depicts Capote's last decade as a merry-go-round of slow self-destruction: bickering with friends and making up, going sober and relapsing, romancing the wrong men and running back to his long-suffering ex (Joe Mantello). The repetition is frustrating, but it feels real.

The first episode tells us almost everything we need to know about the 1975 "feud," establishing Paley's emotional dependence on Capote and her acute sense of betrayal after he publishes his account of a florid instance of her husband's infidelity. After that, the show's narrative leaps around in time and perspective, sometimes taking poetic license to imagine tantalizing might-have-beens.

For instance, the black-and-white third episode pretends to be fly-on-the-wall footage of the Black and White Ball shot by documentarians Albert and David Maysles, of Gimme Shelter fame. (In real life, they made a short film about Capote, but not the ball.) And the fifth episode depicts a leisurely all-day hang-out during which James Baldwin (Chris Chalk), back from his usual haunts in France, tries to inspire Capote to kindle his inner artistic flame and skewer the rich with his long-delayed book.

These novelistic embellishments feel very Capote, and Baitz's dialogue is sharp and funny enough to keep us from minding that the show consists largely of well-dressed people sniping at one another. We may not even mind that most of the Swans (who also include Demi Moore as Ann Woodward and Molly Ringwald as Joanne Carson) remain one-note characters. Only in the case of Lane's iron-jawed, merciless Keith do we regret the lack of deeper exploration.

For all the gleeful campiness, "Capote vs. the Swans" gets serious when it focuses on the friendship of Paley and Capote, depicted here as the feud's true casualty. Watts gives a subtle yet seismic performance as a woman who painstakingly constructs a social persona only to realize that nothing can withstand the tide of mortality. And Hollander does more than reproduce the familiar Capote quirks: He shows us the ambivalence of an artist who is inexorably drawn toward powerful women yet resents his role as their designated sassy gay friend, their court jester.

"Capote vs. the Swans" has its low points. When Jessica Lange shows up to haunt Capote as his mother's phantom, it sometimes plays like a Tennessee Williams parody. But at its best, the show evokes a painful sense of evanescence and wasted potential. The era when Capote was a reigning arbiter of cool is long gone. He might have been much more, but his talent for dominating the discourse makes him relevant to this day.

If you like this, try...

"Feud: Bette and Joan" (eight episodes, 2017; Fubo, Hulu, rentable): The Emmy-winning first season of "Feud" chronicles the acrimony between aging divas Bette Davis (Susan Sarandon) and Joan Crawford (Lange).

Capote (2005; Pluto TV, Tubi, rentable): You'll want to compare Hollander's Capote with Philip Seymour Hoffman's Oscar-winning turn in this absorbing drama about the ethically murky reporting of In Cold Blood. And don't forget Toby Jones' Capote in Infamous (2006; Kanopy, rentable), featuring Sigourney Weaver as Babe Paley.

The Capote Tapes (2019; Hulu, rentable): See and hear many of the real people portrayed on the show in this documentary stuffed with archival testimonies to Capote's colorful behavior.