I've road-tested my advance copies of FX's American Horror Story, the aggressively twisted new series premiering Wednesday night at 10 ET, to peg it as TV's most polarizing series since Twin Peaks. I love it, and see all sorts of potential in it. Others dismiss it immediately and harshly: "The Shining called," sneered one person whose opinion I respect. "It wants its crappy first draft back."
But any show that keeps me thinking about it this long, and smiling so often at its sheer audacity, is one I'm firmly behind as it starts. And after previewing the first three episodes of American Horror Story, I urge you to stay with it...
Series creators Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk, collaborators on Nip/Tuck and co-creators of Glee, pack the pilot with an almost absurd amount of unexplained images, bizarre characters and hostile spirits -- but the plan, clearly, is to explain the past slowly while dramatizing the present at breakneck speed.
On screen, American Horror Story boasts one of the most talented assemblage of actors on television. Connie Britton, fresh from Friday Night Lights, stars as Vivian, whom we meet at a tough time in her life. Her teen daughter Violet (Taissa Farmiga) is rebellious, her husband Ben (Dylan McDermott from The Practice) is unfaithful, and she's seeking medical help for infertility problems.
If a new baby can't save her marriage, perhaps a change of scene can -- so the family packs up its belongings, and Ben's practice as a psychologist, and moves from the East Coast to the West, where they take advantage of a too-tempting real estate deal and buy an old house, even after learning the previous tenants were found dead there.
And once they move in, Vivian and Ben make several new acquaintances, each of them with an off-the-charts creepy factor.
There's the requisite next-door neighbor, Constance, played by Jessica Lange in her first series role -- and she's magnificent. She has a daughter with Down Syndrome, Adelaide (Jamie Brewer), whom we first meet in the program's prologue, set in 1970, as a young yellow-dressed girl warning two adventure-seeking boys not to enter the then-abandoned house. ("You're gonna die in there," Adelaide warns. She says that a lot.)
The house also comes with a housekeeper, Moira, played by Frances Conroy from Six Feet Under. She's like the bartender in The Shining -- always around, apparently, no matter who's in charge -- but she has a split personality that is one of this show's boldest and most intriguing conceits.
When Vivian looks at Moira, she sees her as embodied by Conroy: a weathered, elderly woman with one dead eye, a frumpy figure and an aloof attitude. But when Vivian's husband Ben looks at the same woman, he sees her in her much younger, sexier incarnation, played by Alexandra Breckenridge. She's the kind of maid who, to provoke Ben with aggressive displays of flirtation, enters his study while he's there by saying she has to dust -- then uses the feather duster to dust herself.
And wait, as they say in late-night ads, that's not all. Also lurking around is a former tenant of the home, played by Denis O'Hare from True Blood. He, too, was burned by buying this haunted house -- but in his case, he was burned literally, and now is scarred over most of his body.
Like Constance's daughter, he warns the new residents about the dangers of the house. It isn't long before they listen, but when they eventually try to resell the home, the real estate market has collapsed so quickly, they can't afford it.
And that, as much as the living and dead spooks running around their unloadable home, provides the pervasive horror in American Horror Story. It's not just the toothy ghouls in the basement, or the rubber-suited deviant spirit in the attic -- it's the horror of a marriage gone sour, the secrets of a family no longer connecting. Each member of this new household is haunted, in more ways than one, by demons.
Ben is trying to put an end to his flings of infidelity, so he's tempted by a maid no one else sees as sexy. Vivian is upset about fears of being barren, so her weakness involves fertility. And daughter Violet is a cutter and a recluse, so she's attracted to a similarly destructive young patient whom her dad begins treating -- even though the boy, played by Even Peters, has problems, and a troubled history, of his own.
I see American Horror Story as a sort of fright-night game of Clue. Each person is haunted by something different (even the spirits are haunted, it seems), and each room has its own history and peculiar influence as well. Murphy and Falchuk reveal the rules slowly, but episodes two and three reveal the start of a pattern. Just as Lost established the use of flashbacks in every episode, so does this show, beginning each hour with a prologue showing the house at a different time.
The question, and concern, is whether all these fascinating threads will pull together into a fantastic tapestry, or will unravel into nonsense. With Murphy in charge, there's a legitimate cause for concern.
Nip/Tuck went ridiculously off the rails its last few seasons, doing unacceptably absurd shocks and twists just to push envelopes. And Glee, in season two, lost its way with a series of dramatically adrift "very special episodes."
But American Horror Story isn't in danger of going off the deep end. It starts there, throwing us into an already churning collection of characters and images, and daring us to sink or swim.
And each episode, like the latter years of Nip/Tuck, takes obvious pride in pushing standards, whether from the language used, the violence shown, or the sexuality presented. And sometimes all at once, as when a nurse is taken hostage by a threatening intruder in a flashback from episode two.
If the overall story doesn't coalesce, it could end up being like Season 2 of Twin Peaks -- marvelous set pieces and images, but ultimately nothing that makes sense as a whole.
Or it could be, as it shows the initial promise of being, one of the best new TV shows of the past few seasons. Even as it starts out, American Horror Story has got me thinking a lot about what I've just seen, and waiting eagerly for the next installment.
Only the greatest TV shows usually do that... so we'll see.