Movie Box Review

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.

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.

Mad Men - 1:2

Boardwalk Empire - 11:4

The Good Wife - 5:1

Game of Thrones - 14:1

Friday Night Lights - 16:1

Dexter - 33:1

Mad Men - 1:1

Boardwalk Empire - 7:5

Game of Thrones - 5:1

The Good Wife - 8:1

Friday Night Lights - 11:1

Dexter - 20:1

Mad Men has won 3 years in a row:  can it match The West Wing and Hill Street Blues with 4?  Maybe so, but it's going to be an awfully close race against HBO's Boardwalk Empire  Mad Men's not-so-secret weapon may be its episode The Suitcase, the 2-hander for Jon Hamm and Elisabeth Moss that was one of the best hours the show has ever aired; but this being an industry award, it could be hurt by the extended and very public AMC/Matthew Weiner travails that didn't leave a good taste in anyone's mouth.  Boardwalk could also be hurt by the support for HBO's other nominee Game of Thrones (although that's probably too much of a genre show to win outright).  The Good Wife, a marvelous show in its own right and the only pure network nominee (Friday Night Lights being an NBC/DirecTV share), is a possible dark horse here.  Friday Night, which richly deserves a statuette, is probably getting an "attaboy" pat on the back on its way out the door.  Dexter's season was markedly inferior to its previous one with John Lithgow as the monstrous Big Bad, and is probably out of the running.

Jon Hamm, Mad Men - 4:11

Steve Buscemi, Boardwalk Empire - 23:10

Kyle Chandler, Friday Night Lights - 14:1

Michael C. Hall, Dexter - 14:1

Timothy Olyphant, Justified - 16:1

Hugh Laurie, House - 20:1

ShowbuzzDaily Odds:

Jon Hamm, Mad Men - 8:5

Steve Buscemi, Boardwalk Empire - 3:1

Kyle Chandler, Friday Night Lights - 6:1

Timothy Olyphant, Justified - 12:1

Hugh Laurie, House - 14:1

The most important name here is the one that's absent: because of AMC's scheduling, Bryan Cranston wasn't eligible for Breaking Bad after 3 wins in a row, opening the way for what will probably be a tight race between Hamm (who's never won) and Buscemi.  The knock against Hamm has been that his Don Draper is too self-contained to appeal to Academy voters, who like their Oscar counterparts prefer their performances big; here again, Mad Man's Suitcase episode may make the difference.  If Friday Night Lights has a chance for any surprise win, it's would be Chandler here.  Olyphant was even better on Justified this season than he was the year before, but it's not an award type role.  Laurie will have a better shot next year if this turns out to be the show's last.  Hall will be hurt by Dexter's sub-par year--and by the fact that he plays, you know, a serial killer. 

Bookie Odds:

Julianna Margulies, The Good Wife - 15:20

Elisabeth Moss, Mad Men - 3:2

Kathy Bates, Harry's Law - 6:1

Mireille Enos, The Killing - 12:1

Connie Britton, Friday Night Lights - 16:1

Mariska Hargitay, Law & Order:  Special Victims Unit - 25:1

ShowbuzzDaily Odds:

Julianna Margulies, The Good Wife -1:1

Elisabeth Moss, Mad Men -2:1

Kathy Bates, Harry's Law - 8:1 

Connie Britton, Friday Night Lights - 12:1

Mireille Enos, The Killing - 25:1

The biggest shock of last year's Emmys was Kyra Sedgwick's win over Julianna Margulies; The Good Wife continues to be a superb show, Margulies is a well-respected former winner, and it's likely the Academy will make amends for its oversight.  Moss has the best chance of unseating her, once again because she's got that episode of Mad Men that could almost have been designed as an Emmy showcase.  One can never underestimate the Academy's attraction to performers of a certain age, which puts Bates in the running as a dark horse.  Britton has deserved this award every year Friday Night Lights was on the air, but no one ever said awards were fair.  Enos has little chance of winning for a show whose finale left many viewers angrier than they'd been since the end of Lost, and Hargitay has won already, with no one seeming to think she needs another.