Mid-Season Catch-Up: Has Success Spoiled ‘American Horror Story’?
A few thoughts on the brilliant, batshit series’ latest season.
Hundreds of shocks, dozens of scares, four Emmys, three seasons and one killer vagina in, Ryan Murphy’s American Horror Story — fast(ish)-tracked to ELEVEN at 9.30pm on Mondays — can claim clear, decisive success.
Its latest iteration, Coven, centres on a clutch of witches living in modern-day New Orleans and is earning the series’ strongest reviews and biggest American audiences yet; what started as a cult curiosity for US cable channel FX has morphed into a franchise popular and powerful enough to lure (and keep) actresses so esteemed their names appear in the credits as ‘Special Guest Star Angela Bassett’, ‘With Kathy Bates’, and ‘And Jessica Lange’.
And the GIFs. They’re everywhere. GIFs! That’s how you know the cool kids are watching. But is what they’re watching actually any good?
Frightful, Freaky and Fun: Why Everybody Wants To Be On American Horror Story
American Horror Story always felt like a happy accident, mostly because anthology series haven’t really been a thing since The Twilight Zone was freaking people out a half-century ago. The genre’s structural quirks — singular, season-spanning theme, setting and story; repertory cast of actors — have proved a perfect fit for a gadfly like Murphy to indulge his scattered whims. Clearly he has fun cherry-picking his casts: each seasonal reboot allows him to choose which actors he wants back (albeit in a different role), sideline others (many of them liable to return down the track, anyway), or court some newbies to hop aboard the crazy train.
Tongue planted firmly in cheek, he enlisted Eric Stonestreet of Modern Family to be hatched to death by something called Piggy Man in season one, Dream House; that same year, he put Dylan McDermott into a latex fetish suit. (Thank you, Ryan Murphy.) Season 2, Asylum, saw Adam Levine and Jenna Dewan-Tatum join the cast and, in a delightful move, be killed off just as quickly. Chloë Sevigny’s nymphomaniac mental patient, meanwhile, was so horribly mistreated that she was dunzo by episode six, a boil-covered amputee choked to death by a rosary. The indignity! Even Sevigny complained, post-haste: “I wanted more to do — I didn’t just wanna be the gurgling monster.”
More and more actors, though, are happy to gurgle their way to a pay cheque if it means appearing on one of TV’s hottest shows; by now, the series’ casting announcements have become noteworthy enough to warrant headlines of their own. When I heard Bates and Bassett had agreed to spar with Lange in season three, my head nearly exploded: it was hard to imagine a trio of actresses better-suited for AHS, where scenery chewing is welcome and encouraged. Bonus: that whole witch thing. This was going to be fun.
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What Is The Show Even About?
Hold on tight, and remember that reason, logic and common sense are not permitted in this area.
This year, Lange plays Fiona Goode, who lords over Miss Robichaux’s Academy for Exceptional Young Ladies (a pretty way to say “school for witches”). The student body: four mouthy Gen Y’ers named Zoe, Madison, Queenie and Nan. Fiona, an Academy alum, has returned after a long absence to strengthen the girls’ abilities in dark arts; she is the HBIC — or “Supreme” — of their coven.
Also, someone made this, because why wouldn’t someone make this?
Fiona is not the maternal type: her relationship with daughter and Miss Robichaux’s headmistress Cordelia (Sarah Paulson) is a disaster. She knows one of the Academy girls is destined to replace her as the new Supreme, sucking away what’s left of her youth in the process. Terrified, she numbs herself with booze, pills and casual sex. Fiona is vulgar and depressing. She’s also fabulous.
Bassett stars as Marie Laveau, a vengeful voodoo queen whose ability to fuck your shit up is not even a question given that she’s played by Angela freakin’ Bassett. Marie has perfected the key to eternal life; as such, she has been alive for, well, a long time. Back in the 1830s, she got word that local socialite Madame Delphine LaLaurie (Bates) was committing unspeakable torture (hey, disembowelment!) on the slaves shackled in her basement. So Marie drugged Delphine with a potion that ensured she would never die, bound and gagged the old racist, threw her in a box and buried her alive. BYE.
All these years later, Fiona — desperate to live forever — has dug up Delphine, who a.) must really stink and b.) does not react kindly when she learns that black people are now free citizens, one of them even the President of the United States.
Put off by Delphine’s nasty attitude, Fiona threatens to bury her again — then sours the deal by forcing her to become Queenie’s personal slave.
Am I Supposed To Be Screaming, Laughing, Or Rolling My Eyes?
Gallows humour is a welcome and necessary way for AHS to lever its stories when things get too heavy. Last season, after nine emotionally exhausting weeks in the asylum, viewers were tickled when Lange and Co. — in an out-of-nowhere dream sequence — danced in lockstep as she cooed the 1964 novelty sing-along ‘The Name Game’. The scene became a viral hit.
Murphy has admitted that Asylum was something of a punish; perhaps emboldened by the popularity of that dance-off, he committed to making Coven lighter, funnier, and more accessible. But he also threw us in the middle of New Orleans, a city defined by its brutal antebellum past and the Katrina-scarred present. A controversial head-long dash into the race-relations thicket was always a given.
As Marie, Bassett is doing some of the finest, funniest work of her career. She’s embraced the potentially offensive ooga-booga elements of her role, summoned her talent for icy imperiousness, and made it work. When Marie learned that Delphine had been unearthed, she yelped with regal conviction, “When I plant a cracker-ass bitch, I expect her to stay planted!” It was hilarious-slash-terrifying and had me cackling-slash-shaking on the lounge.
AHS has a commendable track record with topical third rails; it’s explored abortion, anti-Semitism, rape culture, homophobia, S&M and incest with skilful, at times ground-breaking storytelling. What’s not always present is the right dose of sensitivity. That’s not always been a problem for Murphy, whose pre-AHS series (Popular, Nip/Tuck and, to a lesser extent, Glee) brought televised audacity to glorious new heights. But with its no-holds-barred depiction of slavery and a pointed focus on feminism and race, AHS seemed determined to court a more distinct share of controversy. The scenes in Delphine’s dungeon of horrors have been likened to torture porn; when Queenie masturbates before having sex with a half-man/half-minotaur (yes, it really happened), it provoked fat-shaming from the Twitter trolls; and a few TV critics have been compelled to discuss whether or not the series has a race problem.
I’m not sure I’d call it a “race problem”; the phrase implies a kind of deep disrespect that I’m just not seeing onscreen halfway through the season. And if the scenes of slavery come across as torture porn…well, have you read about the real-life Madame LaLaurie? She did torture her slaves! Let’s at least give Coven credit for not shying away from the literally ugly, stomach-turning truth.
Where the series does seem to have gone too far — or at least in the wrong direction — with its racial politics is in its depiction of Delphine as Queenie’s slave, which hasn’t been subversively educational so much as it has embarrassingly crass. Bates, God love her, is a ferociously capable actress, and in flashbacks to Delphine’s salad days she showcases the woman’s despicable core without shame or vanity. But the fish-out-of-water hokum of her modern-day misadventures plays like a failed high-concept comedy, often (wrongly) aiming for camp and landing at cringe. The ridiculous dialogue (“My nerves do flutter a bit when I think about changin’ my hairstyle”) hasn’t helped; nor has Bates, whose cornpone line delivery and constant mugging turned a despicable character into a near-lovable comedy heroine. On Monday night, the women were sharing a jam session over burgers and sodas(!!!) in a drive-thru parking lot and Queenie was calling Delphine “Miss Daisy”.
Too Much of a Good Thing? Or: Why Ryan Murphy Should Be Ignoring Fans
Driving Miss Daisy references haven’t been funny in decades. And that line was not just lazy, but self-aware enough to reveal a potentially ruinous flaw. As he attempts to make Coven more “accessible,” Murphy sometimes capitulates to impulses that cater only to its own deafening hype.
Let’s start with the quartet of young witches. Sure, they have their moments, their best scenes punctuated with tart, knowing one-liners. But aside from Queenie, they’re actually a bit of a snore. Taissa Farmiga’s Zoe lumbers from episode to episode like a dazed idiot, making one bad decision after another. And Emma Roberts’ spoiled-starlet act still hasn’t yielded anything new or provocative to say about fame in the TMZ era.
I get that AHS is popular with young viewers, but this season’s first half was overwhelmed by Miss Robichaux’s version of the bling ring. Much of it felt like a blatant demographic grab, a half-hearted variation on Mean Girls, Charmed or The Craft, as brought to you by The WB.
And the zombies. Remember when the zombies showed up a few weeks ago to torment Delphine, looking like lost extras from Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’ video? Such a groaner. Did they learn nothing from Asylum’s silly alien subplot? Don’t we already have The Walking Dead? Capitulation.
Meanwhile, when news broke that Stevie Nicks had agreed to appear as herself, I cheered. Then I winced. Nicks has been an unseen presence all season — swamp witch Misty Day (Lily Rabe) channels her at every turn, and we’ve heard songs like ‘Gypsy’ and ‘Leather and Lace’. Witch rumours have followed Stevie Nicks for years; a cameo on Coven sure sounds like a great idea. But maybe the idea is enough.
Remember how you wanted to see Betty White in everything, and then suddenly Betty White WAS in everything, and then you just wanted her to go away?
Stevie Nicks cannot become the next Betty White.
What Should We Expect Going Forward?
Objectively sizing up any season of American Horror Story at midpoint is admittedly a fool’s game, and brings to mind Donald Rumsfeld’s famous, Foot-in-Mouth Award-winning assertion: “There are known knowns; there are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns; that is to say, there are things that we now know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns—there are things we do not know we don’t know.”
If AHS fans know one thing, it’s that they don’t know anything. Well, maybe they know one thing: the back half of the season is where things really start to happen. Think of Dream House’s penultimate hour (‘Birth’), with its excruciating labour scene and feverish plot resolutions; or the tear-jerking Asylum finale, which found the wounded (but still beating) heart behind all the nihilism. They were episodic sucker punches, full of story swerves that were impossible to predict.
Coven still has six busy hours to gather its disparate elements, wrap and tie them up with a bloody bow. I have no idea how it will — or, more to the point, should — end. Despite my complaints, I don’t want it to end at all!
But when it does, I hope it stays true to AHS’ idiosyncratic mission statement — to be bold, outrageous and stupidly over-the-top — instead of petering out like a victim of its own success. We’ve all seen how horror treats victims. It’s a rhymes-with-witch.
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American Horror Story: Coven airs each Monday at 9.30pm, on ELEVEN.
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Nicholas Fonseca is a freelance writer and editor and (sometime) master of film studies student based in Sydney. A former editor at Madison, Fonseca has written for WHO, Sunday Life and Foxtel magazines; prior to his arrival in Sydney, he was based in New York City, where he spent a decade as a staff member with Entertainment Weekly.