During the summer, I cracked open my copy of Entertainment Weekly's Fall TV Preview. I was excited because one of the main articles was on a new horror series called "American Horror Story". It had Dylan McDermott and I liked him and I was always a fan of "Nip/Tuck" which the creator of "American Horror Story" was involved in as well. I couldn't wait.
But then it premiered and I couldn't have been more disappointed.
For those of you who don't know the basic story, I'll go through it now as quickly as I can: The story is more about the house than the characters. The house has had all sorts of murders happen in it, half-aborted babies and effeminate, misunderstood teenage mass murderers. Next door to the house lives Constance who seems to be the puppet master of all the goings-on in the house.
Then the family moves in. The father is a Cheating Son of a Bitch with a Heart, the mother is the Strong-Willed Victim and the daughter is Angsty Cool. The reason I've capitalized their descriptors is because this is exactly the character construct that they fit into. I remember their names, but really to understand the unmitigated failure of this television show, it's easier if you do it this way.
The Cheating Son of a Bitch with a Heart is tempted by a maid that walks around wearing nothing and keeps masturbating in rooms by herself. But to everyone else, she's an old lady with a dead eye. Later in the show, it's revealed that years before, Constance killed the maid as a young lady, shooting her through the eye. The maid was more or less being raped by Constance's husband and Constance blamed her so shot them both. This Constance is a rational person who puts a lot of thought into her actions.
That was sarcasm.
But when you watch the trajectory of the series, you're supposed to think that Constance is this calculating woman who works everything so she gets exactly what she wants. But she murders people. It's an interesting character, the only one in the series, and Jessica Lange does her best. It's just too bad that the rest of the characters in the series didn't have this punch to it. If they spent half the time they did with the Constance character with any of the other characters, they wouldn't come off as bullshit and transparent.
Let's take the Cheating Son of a Bitch. Dylan McDermott plays him. I've always liked Dylan McDermott. He has this everyman quality to him that's uncommon in a lot of actors, TV and movie alike. He brings a sort of earnest edginess to every role he plays. He was one of the main reasons I was so excited about the show. I can't blame what happens with his character on him. I can't. As much as I'd like to, it's impossible. Ryan Murphy is the one to blame for all this shit.
Ryan Murphy reminds me a lot of J.J. Abrams and Christopher Nolan in a way. One person saw one thing they did at one point in their career and then told them, "Hey, run with it." Ryan Murphy created "Nip/Tuck" which I'm still not sure has gotten the recognition it deserves. The two leads in that show were two of the most interesting characters in television. But, as with the rest of Murphy's stuff, the rest of the characters fell by the wayside. The son was annoying and easily just a plot device. "Oh wait, you mean Matt fucked some transexual? What do we do?"
Dylan Baker and Julian MacMahon were such consummate professionals that you could really never see them realize that the plots and lines of dialogue they were supposed to trek through. They went with it and gave it their all. These two people were the ones that were responsible for the success of this show. No one else. Not the writing, not the direction, not the minor characters. None of it. Murphy got really lucky.
But when you really think about it, Murphy pretty much breezed through the years that "Nip/Tuck" was on the air because he didn't write all the episodes. The show was inconsistent at best. There were some excellent episodes, some really good campy episodes and then there were just horrible, boring episodes. Baker and MacMahon almost fully convinced me that I was watching a good show.
But I started to realize that I wasn't. The inconsistencies starting rearing their ugly heads. I can't really remember what they were, but I do remember when the show ended, it seemed like they didn't tie up the loose ends of the series. I was extremely disappointed, especially for a show I invested so much time in.
After this, Ryan Murphy turned to "Glee". I can't get through an entire episode of that show because it's cheap. People are way too enamored with this show and I have no idea why. I think part of it has to do with the fact that it dealt with bullying. This bullying movement that happened about a year or so ago. Everyone was against bullying. I hate to tell these people but bullying was prevalent when I was a kid in school too.
Being fifty pounds overweight didn't exactly get me a ton of friends and pushed me away from some people. I wasn't aesthetically pleasing to some of these people and they made it known to me. I shed my share of tears, went to counseling and grew because of it. Now because of parents in high school too busy with their work schedules, they want something done about the bullying. Everyone wants a kid but no one wants to deal with them. So the parents blame the school and the teachers.
Even the ones that are parents of bullies. They don't want to take responsibility for the actions of their asshole kids so they put it on the teachers. This is incredibly unfair. The first thing I should say is that bullying made me realize how dumb people were in the first place. Most of the bullies that made my life a living Hell in high school are now too busy being unsuccessful and jobless to say one word straying from what they tell the people that give them welfare.
But the parents nowadays don't allow for such revelations to happen. They want an answer and they want it now. They want people to understand that their kids are special and they can't be made fun of because it's not nice. Every single thing needs to happen for their kid, they don't need to earn shit anymore. I'm only 28 and I realize this. I can't understand at all why it is that people ten and fifteen years older than I am fail to understand this most basic concept.
Ryan Murphy certainly doesn't. He puts a superficial spin on bullying and gets lauded for it. He introduces possibly one of the most annoying characters on TV (Chris Coifer's character, I don't know his name) and he gets lauded some more. Mind you, none of the characters on this show stray from their intended caricatures. There's the jock, the pretty girl, the cheerleader, the gay guy and the nerd. Wow, that's some Emmy worthy shit.
Now, he's got "American Horror Story" and he weaves a bullying subplot into that. There have been interesting horror stories about bullying and the effects of it, but this certainly isn't one of them. The Angsty Cool girl goes to school, tries fitting in and this girl, for no reason besides the plot required her to, flips out on the Angsty Cool and tries getting her to eat a cigarette. Bullies are stupid and irrational, but this just elevated the bullshit. Eventually Angsty Cool and the bully become sort of friends.
Oh yeah, and then there's the Strong-Willed Victim, the wife. She's been fucked over by her husband and doesn't understand her daughter. Wow, that's some groundbreaking character development. I'm pretty sure Douglas Sirk dealt with this back in the fifties. So, she masturbates too. Great.
But, you get the feeling that Murphy too is masturbating. When you think about it, masturbating is doing a fairly banal activity to please one person and one person only, their selves. Murphy does these plot points and kills characters off, not because it's earned in the story but just because he wants to. Like a kid on an ant hill with a magnifying glass, he does what he wants, playing God.
And granted, yes, "24" was a show that I was a huge fan of that was notorious for this and even that messed up from time to time with the characters they killed off, but 99 times out of 100, it was a character based death and didn't feel like a "Hey, you know what'd be awesome? If we killed this person" situation.
So, now we have these "characters" going through this "plot".
But, there is no real plot. It's the people on screen saying, "We gotta get out of this house" and then never leaving or attempting to. And when they do, something happens that prevents them from doing this, be it a surprise pregnancy or a man in a rubber suit.
Or, the Black Dahlia herself.
This episode is where the show went from sort of harmless stupid entertainment to something that turned around and went offensive. They take an actual person, an unsolved murder case from 70 or so years ago and make her a character on the show. But not only do they show this character as an incredibly desperate person that will pretty much do anything to be famous, they show her getting raped and then having sex with the maid ghost to taunt Dylan McDermott.
For those of you who don't know the story behind the Black Dahlia, it's a pretty simple one: a woman traveled to Hollywood to become famous. She was found one day in an abandoned lot completely drained of blood, cut in half with a Ledger Joker-like smile carved on her face. Creepy, right? They never found out who it was that did it. There were leads, most of them went cold and the legend lived on, the metaphorical scarecrow at the edge of Hollywood, warning people of the dangers of Hollywood and seeking stardom.
I don't really know much about Elizabeth Short (the Black Dahlia) besides what I've said. I guess there were ideas that she could have been selling her body to get ahead. This is all speculative. So Ryan Murphy, in his infinite wisdom, decides to go with that. Show her as some desperate, fame seeking whore who got caught up with the wrong people and killed. While taking huge leaps of logic to do this, I would have almost kind of accepted this type of thing.
But no, Murphy's not done. Because she was killed on the property that the main characters now live in, her ghost cannot leave. So, she gets bored and starts banging the maid, trying to seduce McDermott and doing all sorts of other things. I guess the only thing you can do when you're a ghost is to bang other ghosts (or people) or kill other ghosts (or people). Some are benevolent, but most of them are just mainly id.
So, let me get this straight. Three years ago yesterday my father died. He was 69, died in his bedroom. It was a shock to all of us. What Ryan Murphy would probably say is that my dad is still roaming the house, causing things to go haywire and what not. Because in the "American Horror Story" form of the afterlife, there is no Heaven or Hell. Everyone is just stuck where they die. Does that mean that all the people that die in nursing homes and hospitals are stuck where they are for eternity?
Well, if that's true, Murphy certainly has a pretty sweet deal here. The characters never develop because he kills them off before he gets the chance to. Then once they die, they go after the living people until they die. Once the living people die, then they go after the next. And so on...
This is how the show feels. Like an unending cycle. Like having a friend that tells you the same joke every day, hoping you have a different reaction. I understand why people would be frustrated by this type of thing because I'm usually that guy.
Now, the show killed off all the characters except for Constance during the season finale. Everything kinda got wrapped up, but not quite. As a result, what's happened is kinda like they painted themselves into a corner. There's really nothing else they can do with the show except get a whole new cast. They can't do that, can they?
That's exactly what they're doing. They're going to a new house with a new theme. The first season's theme was infidelity.
So what now? Why is this good entertainment? Is it even entertainment?
Well, I have a theory.
The only reason I watched the entire season was because I kept wondering how they were going to get out of the situations that they had made for themselves. And like Indiana Jones, they kept getting out of the situations. But unlike an Indiana Jones movie, you feel extremely cheated by all of this. At least I did.
I think the reason the show is so popular is because kids that are around 15 or 16 are watching it and thinking it's awesome to see this much sex and violence in a show. A superficial critique from an underdeveloped mind. But why is it that some adults hold it in such regard? Probably for the same reason. To be honest, there's never been anything like this on TV. I swear. But different doesn't always mean good. If you shit out a box of tacks tomorrow morning instead of your regular feces, would you be happy because of the variety? I don't think so.
And that's exactly what the show is: junk food. But, it's not even good junk food. It's not like a "Nip/Tuck" (inconsistencies and all). The acting is okay, compliments going to Lange and McDermott. But they won't be back next year. So what's the point? Are we going to just continue to watch this bullshit on TV and think it's better than it is?
My complaints haven't all fallen on deaf ears. After I posted a few things on Facebook about it, he thought I was just being my usual, critical self about the show. He didn't understand how so many people could like the show and I didn't. So, I invited him down to my house to watch it. I got him a cup of coffee and one for myself. We sat down and watched the entire episode, front to back.
Once it was over, he was on his phone, seemingly texting. Laughing to himself. I said, "What?" He said, "Check my status." I got on my phone, checked and and saw what you see in the subject line of this blog entry.
It is a simple summation of what we watched. Succinct and told the story. That's exactly what the show is. It puts on this sheen of thinking that it's something better than it is and then it turns out the joke is on you. You know those characters that you got to know for this season? Well, they're all dead and they're not coming back. Deal with it. That's just how I roll.
This is not good television and the more we accept these lowered standards for entertainment, the more we're going to have to deal with reality TV and 27 year old adults playing high schoolers.
