Try as I might, I was somehow unable to escape the
gravitational force that is/was American
Horror Story. I was avoiding the show because I tend to be a big, stoneless
chicken when it comes to the horror genre, true, but the far more alienating
factor was the fact that this was another show from Ryan Murphy, who I have a
lot of gripes with as a showrunner. As anyone who reads my Glee reviews no doubt knows, I tend to like Murphy’s show better in
theory than in practice, for while he’s great at creating premises that could
lead to great drama, he rarely seems capable of using said premises to the
greatest effect, as his storytelling style tends to focus on creating singular
moments rather than tell a coherent style. This style is perhaps ratcheted up
to full effect in AHS, and while that
makes the show a complete train wreck, it’s also a train wreck that I couldn’t
stop watching.
I don’t won’t to fool anybody into thinking that this is
some sort of backhand praise, or any sort of praise at all, really. On the
purely storytelling level, AHS is a
complete and abject failure, and the fact that it was both aired on and renewed
by FX really hurts the channel’s image as a provider of quality content. (The
fact that FX seems to be following in AMC ‘s wake be selling out and deciding
to renew obviously terrible shows based solely on ratings makes this even
worse, but that’s an idea to be explored further at a later time.) There is
frankly little that I would call “good” about the show, and the fact that some
many people have become taken with it (it fact, not only did the show premiere
big, but it’s numbers actually grew over its first season) just makes me
frustrated once again in the lack of discerning taste among the majority of the
American populace.
So why then did I decide to watch the entire thing,
especially after both all the negative reviews and the pilot episode proved to
me that this wasn’t going to be a show that I could simply enjoy? Part of it is
that as a television obsessive, I am fascinated by all TV, good, bad, and
middling, and how such shows got to be the way that they did. This at times
turns me into a masochist in terms of my TV watching, something that becomes
very hard to defend not only to those around me, but even to myself. Indeed, for
pretty much most of the running time of the first season (which I watched over
the past two days), I would find myself filled with self-hate while watching
any given episode, only to feel the compulsion to watch the next episode when
the current one was done.
Now, I don’t believe in the whole “so bad it’s good”
argument; I’m capable of enjoying bad things ironically some of the time, but
those times have to include either a group of friends or a good amount of
alcohol in order for me to loosen up and laugh at how bad something is, and
that’s not really something I have the resources to do once a week for thirteen
weeks in a row. But I do believe in shows existing in the “so bad, it’s
fascinating” vein, and that’s right where AHS
falls.
The interest, at least for me, comes in trying to figure
out how the show will surmount (or perhaps utilize) the confines of its
structure/tone to try and tell and an entertaining story. If there was one
thing to properly sum up Ryan Murphy’s general aesthetic, it’s that his shows
are “moment machines”, more interested in giving buzz worthy scenes than dealing
with competent storytelling. This leads to thinks like Connie Britton eating a raw
pig’s brain, Dylan McDermott masturbating, or any of the many blatant rip-offs
of famous horror movies past. None of this really makes sense in or out of
context, and the fact that the show pervaded so many of these pointless and
senseless scenes about only helps to highlight over often the show would remain
stuck in the same gear.
This isn’t to say that nothing ever happened on the show, that there wasn’t some forward
momentum to the overall story. But while things like Vivian giving birth to the
antichrist, Violet discovering she was dead, Ben getting murdered, Hayden
stealing the baby were certainly action among the story, these are all things
that happened in the last three episode (incidentally, I thought these were the
three best), and I’m not really sure how many of these really moved the plot
forward so much as they were just things that sort of happened. In the nine
episodes leading up to these events, what we mostly got from the Harmons was a
lot of bitching about how they weren’t working as a family, and the
never-ending argument of how they should leave the house, but oh no, they can’t
because of their finances are all caught up in some sort of plot contrivance
real estate limbo.
But if the Harmons were boring, most of the other
characters usually weren’t. Indeed, one of the ways that the show seemed to
fill the time between all the Harmon-centric action was to tell us the apparent
multitude of past stories concerning the house, all of which of course ended in
murder and/or bloodshed. While these scenes were likewise problematic in the
sense that they did nothing to forward actual plot, they were usually well-done
enough (remember how much Murphy likes his moments) as to be entertaining for a
few minutes. At times it would seem to grow a bit too ridiculous how many
events happened due to the influence of this house.
And speaking of which, did you know that this house was
evil? Like really, really evil? As a
concept, especially for a horror story, it works in theory, because it’s the sort
of genre that usually doesn’t require as much explanation as a more straight forward
drama or even a sci-fi show. Yet the show sort of made it harder on itself by
not taking this out, when it began to hint at some sort of larger backstory
through the interactions of all the spirits that haunted the house.
Now this in and of itself isn’t a bad thing; however you
felt about all the resolution, Lost
mined a lot of good drama and stories out of the mysteries of the The Island. The problem is that all of those
conversations were essentially the same: the house is evil, and these spirits
are trapped here, some of them against their will. And though we eventually
determined that there were benevolent spirits and antagonistic ones, that and their
backstories was the extent of the show’s mythology, leaving us with no explanation
of why. Again, horror isn’t a genre that really needs explanation, but for the
show to go through this effort to hint that there is a mythology and then not
reveal it just seem cruel, and only serves as further proof that very little
thought was put into the overall story.
That leaves me with one final quibble, and one that I’m frankly
surprised at myself for making: American Horror Story wasn’t scary. Like, at
all. In fact, I think the two creepiest moments of the whole enterprises were
the first round of promo ads and the title sequence, and even that was easy
because, c’mon, creepy children. Now, as I admitted above, I’m not a fan of
being scared by the entertainment that I watch, so I guess I should be thankful
that this was the case, but I would have to imagine that if I wasn’t scared
(and I scare pretty easily), then actually horror buffs certainly weren’t.
And that raises the question of whether this was a
disappointment to them, or if they were picking up what the show was laying
down. (Audience numbers would suggest yes, but then again Nielsen rating don’t
measure how people feel about a
show.) But what exactly was it that the show was laying down? While at times
AHS seemed to be (surprise, surprise) a straightforward horror series, at other
times it seemed like it was seeking to subvert and mock horror tropes, and other
times it just veered off into family drama. This confusing and contentious dialectic
between the serious and that satirical should be familiar to those who watch Glee, and while there was something to
the idea of using horror to explore more ordinary, everyday issues, these three
tones never really seemed to gel together into a coherent whole.
And it was this inconsistent tone that I feel was the, if
not the show’s biggest, at least is most significant problem. Because the three
tones tell markedly different stories, the show seemed more than willing to
tell all three types, logic and consistency be damned. This is why we would get
those random homage and rip-offs to horror movies past, followed by some random
bits of dark humor, and then just a bunch of people yelling at each other. Like
all Murphy productions, there’s a great idea at the center of American Horror Story, but an extremely
flawed execution keeps most of it from landing.
*******
So where does this leave the show? Well, the day after the finale aired, with all
of the Harmons dead and making a oddly treacly existence for themselves as
ghost, Murphy, Falchuck, and FX held a brief press conference in which they announced
that the next season of the show would tell an entirely different story and
focus on a new set of characters (thought they did leave the possibility that
some actors could return in new roles, if they were so inclined). Now, this was
something that Murphy and Co. had been saying since press tour last summer, so
I’m not entirely sure why critics treated this news with such surprise when
this announcement was remade in December, apart from surprise that Murphy
actually stuck with an idea for an extended period.
Now, I’ll grant that this is a new format for television
to be taking, existing partway between an anthology series and a serialized
drama, and it will be interesting to see how the show reinvents itself from
year to year (oh, you know it’s going to happen). I’m just not sure if it’s going
to fix any of the problems that were present in the first season. Even if this
means that all involved won’t have to deal with the rushed schedule that plagued the first season and led to some storylines to be cut or shortened (apparently,
anyways), there will still be the same ADD-addled showrunner at the helm, with
likely the same confused tone and the same incoherent, rambling stories. Now,
it’s quite possible that Murphy and his writers (which includes the excellent
Tim Minear, whose episodes were among this season’s best, and who I’m sure in
stoked to once again be working on a show that sees a second season) could fix
these problems, but if his past work is any indication, this show will only get
worse. And it hard to imagine just how much more this show could fall when one
takes into account how often this season seemed to be breaking through the
quality floor.
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