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Now
that I’ve finished binge watching all 11 seasons currently available of
American Horror Story, I thought it would be amusing to do a little
analysis and ranking of them to get a sense of what I liked or didn’t
within each season and the series as a whole. So before I break things
down by season, I’d like to touch on a few points that apply throughout
the series.
To be clear, I didn’t HATE any of it, but some things
did resonate with me more than others. Ryan Murphy’s explorations of
classic horror tropes within each iteration of his anthology series
offer up some illuminating new perspectives on the horror genre in
general, elevating it to a more sophisticated social commentary. Each
season takes a look at the genre from a different angle, usually weaving
a distinct vein of black humor & camp throughout, in varying
degrees, as the themes touch on topical issues like racism, misogyny and
physical & psychological abuse. Sometimes these worked, while
sometimes they felt a touch exploitative and hit maybe a little too
close to home.
A fairly consistent pattern which runs through
the series is that each season tends to start off with a relatively
coherent, focused concept, but the last third of the season often starts
to fray and unravel into more convoluted trajectories until it loses
some of the momentum which propelled the story early on. Sometimes it’s
like they finished the main story too early and end up resorting to
filler tactics to wrap up the season. We often end up with narrative
devices like time jumps and epilogues designed to resolve plot holes,
but which frequently highlight them instead. It’s an approach that can
become counterproductive to the principal story's thrust when you’re
suddenly feeling like the writers are scrambling to fill episodes and
tie up loose ends.
On the other hand, there’s still a lot to
love about the series, central of which is the rotating and repeating
cast of actors who are challenged to reinvent themselves from season to
season. Top of the heap on that front are mainstays, Sarah Paulson
& Evan Peters, who both have an amazing talent when it comes to
transforming themselves, sometimes to the point of being unrecognizable.
I would also add Denis O’Hare as another adept changeling, who has had
some equally mind-blowing morphs from role to role. Of course the
mainstays of the series are the matriarchal divas, especially founding
monarch, Jessica Lange, who was the centerpiece of the first four
seasons of the series. Along with her, add in Frances Conroy, Cathy
Bates and Angela Bassett. On the younger end of the female cast you
have the likes of Lily Rabe, Leslie Grossman, and semi regulars like
Gabourey Sidibe, Jamie Brewer, Lady Gaga & Chloë Sevigny. One thing
that’s clear from that role call is that this series values its female
cast and has given them a lot of amazing material to work with. Not
that the show doesn’t rely on some key males. Aside from the
aforementioned O’Hare & Peters, you have the likes of Zachary
Quinto, John Carroll Lynch, Finn Wittrock & Cody Fern to round out
some of the more notable recurring male cast. Whatever the
configuration of cast & characters, it’s always fun waiting to spot
those favorites in whatever role they’ve been given for each iteration.
So let’s get into the specifics of the seasons and see where I
stacked them up. You might be surprised by some of my favorites, but
it’s not an easy task to rank them all.
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01 NYC (season 11)
I’ve
already written in-depth about this season, so I’ll keep it short here.
Suffice to say that I was not expecting, after 10 seasons, for this
most recent incarnation to top my list, but I can’t place it anywhere
else, simply because nothing else has hit me so personally and deeply in
terms of emotional impact. It’s a story I wasn’t expecting and which
blasted away all my expectations about what this series was capable of
achieving.
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02 FREAK SHOW (season 4)
Freak
Show was my #1 favorite season all along until S11:NYC came along, but
it’s gonna stay tight at #2. The reason for that is entirely down to
the incredible characters who were brought to life, and the respect for
the culture to which this season is a love letter and tribute. The
world of human oddities was a misunderstood and demonized society for a
long time. The long banned feature film, Freaks (1932), forms the
conceptual foundation for this season and virtually everything that
happens in it is an homage to that film. The casting of this season is
simply remarkable as they managed to incorporate numerous real life
“oddities” and they all deliver outstanding performances in their roles.
Where they were created from scratch for the screen, like Naomi
Grossman as Pepper, the transformation was astoundingly perfect and
uncannily realistic. The work they did for Sarah Paulson’s twin roles
as the conjoined Bette & Dot is nothing less than miraculous. The
characters all ring true to life and they create a palpable sense of
community and family bond between them and that’s what sells the whole
story to me. The sense of outsiders being misunderstood is something
that also hit home for me and helped me connect with the story and the
struggle to be accepted.
This season was the best for Jessica
Lange as Elsa Mars, the duplicitous diva in charge of the show. Her
musical numbers, always covering David Bowie songs, were stunning, in
particular her rendition of “Heroes”, which is staged near identically
to the promotional video Bowie created for the single. I’ve never
smiled so broadly with glee than when that song came on and I understood
how it connected with everything that was going on in this story.
Glorious.
The other element that makes Freak Show a favorite is
the sense of tragedy and loss that comes about with certain characters
and their fates. Ma Petite, in particular, was a particularly
devastating character, especially since they teased it in a way where
you initially thought that it would be a fake-out, but then it ended up a
reality, and a heartbreaking one beyond compare. There were so many
levels to that tragedy that it all worked in concert to leave the viewer
utterly bereft by the end of it all.
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03 HOTEL (season 5)
For
me, the biggest selling point of Hotel is the art direction. The Art
Deco decor of the Cortez is a major character for this story, which
loosely lifts from Stephen King’s The Shining, though setting the series
in an urban environment, rather than rural. The sheer grandeur and
mystery in the walls of this hotel is astounding and the entire season
is dripping with visual decadence and glamour. It’s simply stunningly
beautiful to look at throughout, even when it’s bloody and ravaged.
While
it was the first season to be missing lead diva, Jessica Lange, the
casting director smartly substituted in Lady Gaga for one of her first
acting roles and she does a fine job of bringing vampiric menace to the
party. But the real standout, cast wise, would have to be Denis O’Hare,
who gender-bends his way into his most memorable performance since True
Blood’s Russell Edgington told prime-time TV viewers he was going to
eat their babies. But whereas Russell was a maniacal villain, Liz
Taylor is an incredibly sympathetic transgender tragedy who beguiles and
enchants throughout the entire season. Then there’s Sarah Paulson’s
nearly unrecognizable transition into junkie-whore Sally, who cops a bit
of Blade Runner “Pris” edginess to her look. You’ve also got first
class turns from Kathy Bates and Chloë Sevigny, while Evan Peters
delivers his most nefarious provocateur, James Patrick March, who eerily
reminds me of an old Kids in the Hall character, Bruno Puntz Jones, but
I’m sure that’s just coincidence.
The season is also notable
for introducing vampires into the AHS canon, who commingle with the
hotel’s ghosts, of the type well established in the premier season’s
“Murder House”. The Cortez seems to be similarly vexed by the same
unholy curse as Murder House, obeying the same basic “physics”. But the
vampire trope implementation here is distinctly unhindered by
traditional limitations & prohibitions and the results are
exceptionally entertaining, especially when an outbreak of vampirism
sweeps a gaggle of grade school children. The season also has a lot of
fun with famous serial killers popping in for cameo appearances, while
furthering the Halloween lore also established in Murder House.
Overall, it’s a sexy, seductive entry in the franchise and exceptionally lovely to look at.
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04 COVEN (season 3)
Coven
scores points from me for being the season of “girl power”. This was
the season where the focus was clearly on the women of AHS and they all
shone with exceptional brightness in their witchy wickedness. This
season brings in the mythology of magic and let’s the ladies have a ball
with it. Everyone’s got their own special powers and the variety of
forces at the fingertips of these females is most formidable! The
performances on display here are consistently top notch, as evidenced by
the stack of Emmy nominations that were given to Lange, Paulson,
Bassett, Conroy, and Bates, with Lange & Bates winning their
categories.
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05 ASYLUM (season 2)
The
general ambiance of Asylum was so oppressive that it was sometimes hard
to take, but it ultimately had an incredible amount of story to tell.
Maybe too much as we get alien abductions, serial killers, demonic
possession and Nazi war criminals all vying for attention, and that’s
not to mention the merely insane, who were more often than not, simply
misunderstood. Still, when you’ve got James Cromwell as a guest star,
you’re in for something special.
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06 APOCALYPSE (season 
It’s
the mother of all crossover seasons! All of the seasons of AHS have
plot threads that interconnect them in some manor or other, but they’ve
generally been subtle and relatively minor. That all changed with
Apocalypse as we bring Murder House, Coven and Hotel together into a
braided tapestry of interwoven story arcs and character relationships.
For my money, the standout performance comes from Frances Conroy as
Myrtle Snow, who was a minor character from Coven, but who gets a much
more significant presence here. She’s a standout even if only for that
stunning hairdo! Billy Porter also makes a grand impression as the
story offers up a delicious battle of the sexes were witches and
warlocks go toe to toe in their struggle for supremacy. Revisiting
Murder House is a lot of fun and touching base with the Cortez family
ties up some loose ends, but the season, overall, wreaks havoc on the
continuity of the franchise as a whole, with everything that’s come
before this season thrown into question. We really don’t know what’s
still standing after all this and I don’t think we ever will.
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07 MURDER HOUSE (season 1)
It’s
the season that started it all and it does have a lot going for it, but
it merely ends up lower on this list simply because the series has had
so much room to stretch out since this comparatively modest haunted
house yarn hit the screen. Again, Frances Conroy stands out as Moira
and Jessica Lange makes her mark on the franchise in short order,
setting the bar high for performances.
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08 CULT (season 7)
I
think this season would have had more impact if I’d seen it at the time
it originally aired, when the wound of MAGA was fresher and the theme
of the season was more closely tied to current events. It’s still a lot
of fun, but I’m not quite convinced the producers quite captured the
essence of what makes a cult tick and why people get drawn into these
social constructs. I did enjoy some of the casting choices as Sonny
& Cher offspring, Chaz Bono, got a great recurring role and Evan
Peters working his way through all the most notorious cult leaders
throughout the series was impressive. The connection to Warhol and his
assailant Valerie Solanas was amusing and Peters also made a pretty good
Warhol.
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09 DOUBLE FEATURE: RED TIDE (season 10.1), DEATH VALLEY (season 10.2)
After
the disappointment in terms of casting for 1984 (see below), which
lacked numerous long time regulars, they were all back in the fold for
the Red Tide portion of season 10. Sarah Paulson, who really pushed the
limits for a truly unrecognizable role, Even Peters and the delicious
Francis Conroy were all on hand for another take on the vampire trope,
this time with the benefits of science behind the lore. This story felt
a bit like a stab at the divide between the liberal elite and the
ignorant masses as the “enhancement” drug separated the “brains” from
the “brutes”.
The second half of the season did something
entirely new by forgoing the fate of so many seasons, which often
present a set of frayed epilogues to the main story, weakening the
finale. This time, they simply told an entirely different tale, one of
alien invasions, alternating between 1950s sci-fi camp and modern
X-Files type conspiracies. I was expecting this to finally revisit the
aliens from the Asylum season, but there was no apparent connection
between them. Still a lot of tentacle twisting fun.
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11 ROANOKE (season 6)
The
gimmick of parodying “reality reenactment” TV was fun to start with,
but to drag it out over the course of an entire season became a bit
exhausting after a while. Coupled with the brutality of cannibalism and
so much grotesque gore, what with the disemboweling and all, it was
just a bit much for me at times. Poor Leslie Jordan (RIP)! Even Sarah
Paulson admitted in an interview after finishing work on the season that
she wished she'd been able to give it a miss.
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11 1984 (season 9)
This
homage to ‘80s horror was very cute and well done, at least to start,
but the biggest weakness for me was the absence of big hitter cast
regulars like Sarah Paulson and Evan Peters. There were certainly great
performances from the folks who did participate, but it didn’t have the
gravitas of a real big name to hold the center of the story. There was
no Kathy Bates or Frances Conroy or Angela Bassett or anyone of that
caliber to ground it all. The Richard Ramirez character also came under
fire from families of his victims for glamorizing the serial killer as
well.
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So that's a
somewhat concise rundown of the series as it stands now. I'm wondering
what we'll get with the next installment as the series has apparently
been renewed up to season 13, if Murphy and crew wish to keep going.
After NYC, it's anyone's guess what could possibly be next. Personally,
I'd love to see a sci-fi season in space!
