Cliche Jamboree: American Horror Story TV Review

I have never watched an episode of Glee, I’m proud to say, nor was I a fan of the FX drama Nip/Tuck. The new FX horror drama from the creators of both those shows, American Horror Story, began this week. The show has been heavily promoted on the network and elsewhere, with much of the initial buzz touting a return to the greatness of the horror genre. After watching as much of the pilot as I could stand, which turns out to be about 40 minutes, I can honestly tell you if this is a return to greatness for horror, I’d prefer we go back to whatever low points horror supposedly languished in.

Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t a HORRIBLE show, it’s just not a very good one. One could adequately describe it as a badly contextualized hodge podge of every horror genre cliche imaginable, all thrown together into a confused, badly-edited mess. The story starts in the 1970’s with the mongoloid child Claudia telling two very ugly and precocious twin boys that they will die inside the house they are vandalizing. Of course, said deaths happen in short order, before we flash forward to today, with Vivien Harmon (Connie Britton) recovering mentally and physically from a miscarriage. She then discovers her psychiatrist husband Ben (Dylan McDermott) boffing one of his students. Cut to later, when the couple and their daughter move to Los Angeles to get a “fresh start.” Seriously? Who goes to Los Angeles to get a fresh start but actors who couldn’t make it on Broadway? With little fanfare or sense, the family buys a Victorian mansion beautifully restored by a gay couple, sold for a song because the couple had ended their lives in a bloody murder suicide within the house. In short order, we get the hubby tempted by a maid who appears an old crone to the wife but a buxom young hottie to the sex-starved husband. The daughter gets picked on in school because she’s smoking in a common public area of the campus. One of Ben’s patients, a high school student dreaming of going all Columbine on his classmates gets chummy with the daughter, which causes Ben to lose it on the little psycho. And before we’ve even made it to the half hour mark, we’ve already seen McDermott’s naked ass stroking it in front of a window to the thought of the buxom crone maid. I had finally had enough when the husband and wife, who hadn’t touched each other in a year, started having violent monkey makeup sex after an argument. In between all that quick cut craziness, Jessica Lange wanders in as the Old Virginian mother of the aforementioned mongoloid child, who still feels it necessary to tell people like Vivien that they are going to die in this house.

If you happen to like the sound of all that silliness, American Horror Story is for you. For me personally, I got more irritated with it as the minutes went on. With the exception of the wife, every single character was nonsensical and annoying. Characters can be unsympathetic as most of these characters are, but when they actively irritate you to the point of wishing to punch them all in their collective gobs, they aren’t being well-written. I didn’t care about any of the characters, and wanted most of them to be dropped from the top floor of the house. They do things that don’t make sense. Why would the shrink see patients like the neo-Columbine kid in his house? Then he lets the kid wander around the house without seeing him out personally, knowing that his teenage daughter is in the same house, then get pissed when he finds the two kids talking? Is he supposed to be that much of an asshole? How does the daughter get away with smoking in plain sight at school? How does the wife just accept a total stranger who says she’s the housekeeper, without asking the realtor any sort of questions about it, or verifying that the old crone is what she says she is? I won’t start on Jessica Lange’s character other than to say both she and her mongoloid child don’t fit in the context of a modern day story set in Los Angeles. In short, lots of the set up requires all of the characters to be goddamn idiots or completely out of context with the setting. Much of it is very jarring, taking me completely out of the story, a feeling exacerbated by the quick cut choppy editing that constantly shifts the viewpoint from one camera to another without justification.

I’ve seen worse pilots, but I’ve seen a lot better. With so much good stuff to watch, there’s no reason to take time with this show. I’d give it two stars out of five, and recommend you only watch if there’s nothing else to watch.

October 8, 2011 at 6:42 pm | Movies & TV | No comment

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