Movie Box Review

Possibly because the Golden Globes take place in much less proximity to the Emmys than they do to the Oscars, and thus aren't the crucial part of network gamesplaying that they are for the movie studios, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association's TV awards have always tended to be more adventurous and genuine than the ones they give to movies.

The Downton award was cause for celebration, as were the 2 major wins that Showtime's HOMELAND took for Drama and Best Drama Actress, to the spectacular Claire Danes.  Ditto for the universally lauded Peter Dinklage from GAME OF THRONES.  

Most of the other acting awards celebrated shows that are more uneven, but the performances themselves are beyond reproach:  Matt LeBlanc's wry work as "himself" in Showtime's EPISODES, Jessica Lange's campy yet fully-committed turn in FX's wacky AMERICAN HORROR STORY, Idris Elba's riveting dark homicide detective in BBCAmerica's LUTHER, Kate Winslet's superbly textured portrayal of HBO's MILDRED PIERCE, and Kelsey Grammer as the uncompromisingly grim antihero of Starz's BOSS.  HBO's ENLIGHTENED and Laura Dern's lead role are acquired tastes that this viewer hasn't acquired, but one has to respect both the work and HFPA's willingness to honor it.

One question, though;  does anyone know what NBC will be airing the night after the Super Bowl?  After watching tonight's telecast for 3 hours, I find myself completely unaware of what they may have on tap.  Just wondering...

When you watched the tableau of the all-dead Harmon family in the season finale of AMERICAN HORROR STORY merrily trimming the tree while a Christmas carol played in the background, did you think "Oh boy, I can't wait to see what terrors await them next season!"  Or "How long will Violet really resist the charms of her psychopathic mass-murderer beau?"  Well, dream on, because we've seen the last of the Harmons and their Murder House.

Horror honcho Ryan Murphy revealed today that next season (and in each succeeding season), the entire plotline, location and set of characters will be changed, so we'll be in an entirely new haunted locale.  (Supposedly there's a clue as to where Season 2 will take place somewhere in the last 3 episodes of this past season.)  It's possible that a few original cast members will show up in Horror 2.0, but if they do, they'll be playing different characters, with no relation to the ones they played this season.

It's an unusual move that basically requires the show to relaunch every season, with the title and general theme of spookiness in the US the only returning elements.  But it promises to keep the show fresh-- and how many more residents of Murder House could we have watched, anyway?  

Murphy says details of Season 2 will be announced in February,.

You have to give AMERICAN HORROR STORY the credit of its crazy, crazy convictions.  Ryan Murphy and his gang of producers followed through on where the last few episodes appeared to be going, and the result will be a second season presumably very different from its first.

It didn't take long for the picturesquely titled season finale "Afterbirth," written by Supervising Producer Jessica Sharzer and directed by house helmer/Co-EP Bradley Buecker, to eliminate the last living adult member of the Harmon clan, as Dylan McDermott's paterfamilias Ben was hung from the second-story landing in a fake suicide engineered by dead and ever-more-bitter ex-girlfriend Hayden.  (Incidentally, given Kate Mara in this series and her sister Rooney in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, a helpful piece of advice would be to avoid pissing off any of the Mara girls.)  

The systematic deaths of the show's protagonists, however, was not the bleak conclusion one might have expected it to be.  On the contrary, the episode then segued into a deranged variation on Beetlejuice, as the "good ghosts," led by the Harmons, helped out the new owners by scaring them out of the house before they could suffer any lasting damage.  Since no one was actually getting hurt, this was all quite funny, especially when Ben and Vivien both slaughtered each other, practically winking as they said--quite honestly--"You can't imagine how long I've wanted to do this."  (I hate to ask a question that might require something to make sense, but just where the hell did dead Vivien get that cello?  Surely the Harmons' belongings were cleared out of the house before the new family moved in?  Never mind.)

And the bizarre tone didn't end there, because American Horror Story somehow managed to arrive at something very like a happy ending.  It turned out that Vivien's first baby, who seemed to be stillborn in last week's episode, had actually let out a cry before dying, which qualified him for ghost-hood.  This meant that Vivien could be his eternal mom, and the entire reunited dead family, Ben, Viv, Violet and baby, plus newly-appointed godmother Moira, all decorated a Christmas tree together as "The Little Drummer Boy" played on the soundtrack.  Yes.  Really. 

Next season, this Happy Household Of the Living Dead will apparently be combined with more than a little helping of The Omen, because Vivien's other baby, the half-demon one that was the result of Tate's ghost-rape, turns out to be quite the handful.  Constance managed to grab possession of the babe after Ben's untimely demise (since no one knew Violet was dead, she said the teen had run away with her baby brother), and she'd been proudly raising little Michael next door.  In the "3 Years Later" flashforward that ended the season, however, she discovered that Mikey had committed his (first?) bloodthirsty murder, joyfully slashing his babysitter's throat. 

And... scene.  Say this for American Horror Story:  it packs more story, unhinged and illogical as it may be, into a single episode than The Walking Dead manages in a season.  Who knows what will be added to the mix next year:  Superheroes?  Gargoyles?  CG talking animals?  A spectral Napoleon Bonaparte?  Guest appearances from the cast of Glee?  One feels like anything is possible, and while that's not a recipe for coherence or basic sense, it's certainly been consistently watchable so far.

Our thoughts on the movie Golden Globe nominations are here. 

Meanwhile, in television:

BREAKING BAD:  LOSER - Really, one should say Golden Globes Credibility:  Loser, because when you fail to even nominate the best season of one of the best shows of the decade, that's what you lose.  And if not nominating the series itself is a shame, passing over Giancarlo Esposito for his truly spectacular performance as Gus Fring is a crime.

NEW DRAMAS:  WINNERS - Of the 5 nominees for Best Drama, only one (Boardwalk Empire) is even in its second season.  All the others (Homeland, American Horror Story, Game of Thrones, Boss) are newcomers.  And also Winners:  Pay-Cable Networks, which are responsible for 4 of the 5.

ENLIGHTENED and GLEE:  WINNERS - For managing to garner Best Comedy nominations despite being only barely tolerable most of the time.

CALLIE THORNE:  WINNER - For the WTF nomination of the entire day, a truly bizarre nod to this very talented actress for Drama Actress in the negligible Necessary Roughness.  Among the actresses who didn't get nominated in this slot:  Connie Britton for Friday Night Lights (or for that matter, American Horror Story), Glenn Close for Damages, any of the women in Parenthood, and Anna Torv in Fringe.

MANDY PATINKIN:  LOSER - Homeland won richly deserved nominations for Drama and for its remarkable performances by Claire Danes and Damian Lewis.  But Patinkin, who's been turning in the most restrained, emotionally detailed work of his entire career, was overlooked.

FX's AMERICAN HORROR STORY held up quite well in its second airing last night with a 1.4 in 18-49s, dropping only about 15% from its premiere (even though it faced new competition from the return of USA's PSYCH, which did a 1.0).

That's may not be Walking Dead level success (the zombies did 2.4 in their second episode, and eventually got to a 3 for the season finale), but it probably means plenty more hours to come of crazily illogical, movie-referencing violence and general creepiness.  Can't wait for the crossover with Glee!  

Ratings for last night's premiere of AMERICAN HORROR STORY on FX are promising, if not overwhelming.  The show's 10PM initial airing was watched by about 2 million people 18-49, which should equal something like a 1.5 rating in that demo; when the night's 2 rebroadcasts are added, the number goes to 3.2 million people or around a 2.4 rating.

A couple of comparisons:  if rebroadcasts are included, this is slightly up from last season's Sons of Anarchy average on FX, which had about 3 million 18-49 viewers, but in an apples-to-apples comparison of the 10PM airing only, it's somewhat lower.  (However, as FX was quick to note, even the 10PM broadcast alone was higher than the 1.5 million 18-49s who watched the first broadcast of the Sons premiere, since that show built its audience over time.)  Comparing it within genre, though, the news is a bit less happy:  the first broadcast of the Walking Dead premiere on AMC was 80% higher than Horror Story's, with 3.6 million 18-49 viewers. 

Of course, Walking Dead went down a slight 10% in its second episode, an unusually good hold from a hyped premiere--and then continued to build after that.  If Horror Story can follow the same trajectory, FX will be happily horrified.  

The first inkling of just how deranged AMERICAN HORROR STORY is going to be comes with one of the early "normal" scenes.  The location isn't the haunted house, so we're away from the girl with Down's Syndrome who tells people they're going to die in there, the brutally murdered identical twins, the body parts and fetuses preserved in jars... I could go on. But at this point in the story, we're at the private high school where teen Violet (Taissa Farmiga, sister of Vera, who played the younger version of her sister in the recent Higher Ground) is merely smoking a cigarette where it's prohibited, and the local mean girls don't approve (one of their grandmas died of lung cancer).  Yet even this scene is staged with such intense, hyped-up rage that you might think a massacre is about to take place.  The message is clear:  Abandon restraint, all ye who enter here.

"Restraint" isn't a word associated with Ryan Murphy and his co-creator Brian Falchuk in any case (Murphy also directed the pilot)--whatever their strengths and failures, both Nip/Tuck and Glee have been all-in propositions, veering wildly from serious drama to wild perversity often in the course of a single episode.  Letting Murphy and Falchuk loose in the horror area is like granting them a license to kill, mutilate, and generally rampage.  American Horror Story, with its oddly emblematic title ("American" as opposed to what, exactly?  A Portuguese horror story?) embraces all the leeway the genre provides; watching it, you can almost feel Murphy and Falchuk exulting: Where has this genre been all my life?

On the most basic level, American Horror Story has a classic set-up:  the very troubled Harmon family moves from Boston to Los Angeles, where they buy a house with a history of terrible events.  (The gay couple who owned the house previously died in a murder/suicide, and that's just the beginning.)  Vivien (Connie Britton) had suffered an awful late-term miscarriage and hasn't been, psychologically or physically, the same since; after that, her psychiatrist husband Ben (Dylan McDermott) cheated on her with a 21-year old, Vivien walked in on them, and while the couple has remained together, they're completely estranged.  Violet is an outcast who hates LA and cuts herself, but she finds her life livened up when she meets Tate (Evan Peters), one of Ben's patients, who has elaborate fantasies about wreaking Columbine-type vengeance on his schoolmates and is also suicidal.  Plus there's the next-door neighbor Constance (Jessica Lange), mother of the Down's Syndrome woman who "has a way" of getting into the house even when all the doors are locked; Constance has some as-yet unclear involvement with whatever terrors the house contains.

There are many influences here, but the predominant one seems to be The Shining.  Like the novel and especially the Kubrick film, there's the general idea of a family's psychosexual dysfunction being absorbed and amplified by the evil spirits of their dwelling (just as Jack Torrance saw a beautiful, naked woman in place of a rotting corpse, when Ben looks at the elderly housemaid Moira, he doesn't see Frances Conroy, but rather the young, very sexual Alexandra Breckinridge).  More specifically, there's the suggestion that Ben will be coaxed by the house into trying to murder his family, which is apparently what happened to previous owner Larry Harvey (Denis O'Hare).

Luckily for American Horror Story, the genre doesn't require too much in the way of logic, which is typically a weak point for Murphy and his team.  On the other hand, it's very unclear how they're going to sustain this premise beyond a few episodes--after a certain point, there are only so many repellent, terrifying incidents the family can undergo before they'll seem like complete idiots for staying in the house.  For now, though, the show is quite compelling in its crazed way (it certainly isn't dull).  It's also graced by some terrific acting.  Even though Vivien is hardly comparable to Tami Taylor on Friday Night Lights in terms of depth or fullness, Britton brings the same kind of commitment and intelligence to the role, while McDermott, Farmiga, O'Hare, Peters, Conroy and especially Lange offer effective creepiness.

It remains to be seen whether American Horror Story will offer anything beyond superficial scares, let alone a coherent story or meaningful theme.  But the horror genre is, if nothing else, a flexible one, and cheap thrills can be satisfying too, if they're well done.  So far, the show is off to a darkly entertaining start.