AMC’s early-’60s drama “Mad Men” costs a reported $2.3 million per episode. It’s well worth it, but take an episode on its own and it likely wouldn’t stand up. Not in a “Lost” way (overwrought flashbacks, green smoke, self-important James Joyce references) — just in the simple way that there was a before and an after to every episode. Episodic dramas can end in cliffhanger style because you know the next week, they’ll hoist you back up, let you know what happened, and spin you along on another segment. Yeah, mobster saga “The Sopranos” cut to black and blasted “Don’t Stop Believing” without everything tied into bows and sealed in concrete boots, but after 86 episodes, that’s allowable.

That said, one wishes that the $7 million that was spent on the Coen brothers’ “A Serious Man,” to recreate a world a few years after “Mad Men,” a few miles farther west and centered on suburban Minnesotan Jews instead of mid-town WASPS, could have been an investment in another period drama. An episodic one. Because by the end of the movie, you’re frustrated and likely to shout that you hate the damn thing — not because it was a bad piece of work, it wasn’t, but because they didn’t give you enough. Ideal for TV, because then you’ve got a bunch of things your audience can wonder about, and you can dazzle them a few episodes or a season down the line.

The eschatological plot of “A Serious Man” follows a shmendrik son and father. The former is interested in getting stoned and rocking out to Jefferson Airplane on his solid-state transistor radio instead of studying for his Bar Mitzvah. The latter is a doormat of a buttoned-down physics professor who unmenschily goes to pieces when a half-fluent, flunking Korean student slips him an envelope of bribe cash. Then, there’s his brother, the suspected criminal gambler and sodomite, who’s moved onto the couch and spends his days simultaneously draining a neck-humping sebaceous cyst (occupying the home’s one bathroom to do so, and therefore driving the family’s horrid, perpetually hair-washing teenager daughter meshugge) and scribbling nonsense, mazes and numbers into a notebook. The wife is so exasperated by it all that she’s fallen for a paunchy, balding, near-sighted widower friend whose redeeming aspects comprise 1) a radio voice and 2) his ability to buy a bottle of non-Manischewitz wine.

“Joy of Yiddish” this ain’t. A beaten man moves from his beaten marital bed to a beaten cot to a beaten twin bed at a local flop motel. The radio is confiscated. The burly goy neighbor with the dead 10-pointer strapped to his station wagon roof mows his lawn in a threatening manner. The main character gets an X-ray and an angry bill-collecting call from the Columbia Record Club demanding money for Santana’s “Abraxas.” A lady sunbathes in the nude (and probably slicked with baby oil — you can just see her, 20 years on, looking like a baseball mitt). There’s a tornado at the end and a prologue, never directly tied to anything else, about a garrolous Eastern European man and his grim wife who may or may not have seen a ghost. They might be Tevye the milkman’s less melodic neighbors. We never find out.

There’s a running dialog in “A Serious Man” about the meaning of life, what happens after death and the difference between the Jewish way of looking at things and the Christian view of a land of milk and honey paradise. “Receive with simplicity everything that happens to you,” an opening Rashi quote instructs us. At one point, a rabbi tells the main character a story about a dentist congregant who notices a Hebrew message in the teeth of a goy patient: “Help me, save me.” In a subsequent dream, Sy, the man who’s lured his wife away, confronts Larry at the only place Larry’s still comfortable — his blackboard: “I’ll concede that it’s subtle,” he says about a proof on the board. “It’s clever. But at the end of the day, is it convincing?”

Is the movie asking to be saved? By putting the question of cleverness and subtlety upfront like that, does it hope to dispel questions about quality as the product of a boorish mind? Were this a grand-scale, premium cable show, I’d be raring to find out. As it is, I’m willing to put up with it — but, like Larry Gopnick, some answers would be nice.

Ashley O’Dell reviews movies that aren’t in theaters anymore.