Why I'm Giving 'American Horror Story' Another Shot

As a professional TV watcher, I really do try to sample everything I think has a chance at entertaining me (and some I'm pretty sure won't -- see Revolution, The Mob Doctor, Vegas, Chicago Fire...). For one thing, nothing annoys me more than when other people jump on a TV bandwagon late and then are all, "Don't even tell me who Gus is, I'm only up to Breaking Bad Season 2!" For another, if I try a show and like it, that means I'm increasing the amount of happiness I will experience in my life.

So around this time last year, I dutifully watched the pilot of American Horror Story, even though I was prejudiced against it for a couple of reasons. The first season of The Walking Dead, after all, was a dispiriting object lesson in why horror doesn't work so well on TV: what makes a horror novel or movie work is that it builds to some kind of catharsis, whereas TV, by its very nature, must continually postpone resolution so that the series can keep going.

Plus, there's the Ryan Murphy factor. I never watched Popular or Nip/Tuck, but when he brought the world Glee -- set in a high school, revolving around musical numbers -- it seemed as though it was targeted specifically to me. But you probably know how that went, because it went the same for you: it started promisingly enough, but got tiresome as its characters and plotting grew increasingly inconsistent and, early in the second season, I bailed, in classic Ariano style (in the middle of an episode). Knowing there was going to be a reboot of sorts, with several characters leaving McKinley High, I returned to Glee for the fourth-season premiere last month, but...yeah. No. Rachel (Lea Michele) is still tiresome, the show's sexual politics are still offensive, I still don't care.

Anyway, I did give American Horror Story an honest chance last year, and it didn't hook me. Murphy's sense of camp is still so strangely calibrated that AHS was credible neither as a scary drama with a credible real-world setting (like The Strangers, for instance), nor as a supernatural creeper (like Rosemary's Baby). One of the legitimate knocks on Glee is that its characters seem to be in different shows from week to week. But the structure of AHS last season made that almost literally true: it's a ghost story, with spirits co-existing in the present who had lived in the haunted house at various points in history, and who had met their demise in a variety of different storylines. So while Connie Britton was trying to reconcile with her philandering husband in 2011 Los Angeles, her daughter was hanging out with a dead kid, and her husband was cheating on her with a uniformed maid from who the hell knows when, and then there's the guy in the latex suit...I mean, it was a lot. I probably would have quit the pilot halfway through if Mark Lisanti -- my boss at the time -- hadn't ordered me to see it through. But that's as far as I got.

I had hoped it would sink into oblivion, but unfortunately for me, AHS turned into kind of a sensation. From what I heard, it got more and more bananas over the course of its first season, with all kinds of random guest stars passing through. And now, in its second season, the ones I might have liked to have seen (like Sarah Paulson and Zachary Quinto) have a bigger role. Not only that, but from what I can tell from its marketing, the show has not only relocated to an earlier historical era, but it exists in a different context: now we get to see what the house was like when it was (a) a crazy house (b) run by nuns (c) when people barely understood mental illness and (d) every remedy that existed to treat it was totally horrifying. FINE. I'M INTRIGUED.

So even though I'm still dubious about the idea of a horror TV show and even though I still think Ryan Murphy is basically a hack, I have to respect the idea of rebooting a show that was so buzzy and successful (even though I still think the idea that it competed as a miniseries at the Emmys was bullshit). We'll see how this goes tonight.