American Horror Story Preview

American Horror Story is a conundrum to me.  I can say with certainty that the writing is some of the most horrifically bad prose that I have come across, yet there is some inexplicable effect that is drawing me to FX’s newest experiment.  After just finishing the third episode, I’ve come to the conclusion that the mystique behind the show is oddly compelling, but everything around that mystique is absolutely terrible.

Connie Britton really provides quite a great performance

With AHS, you can expect at least one terrible utterance in every dialogue, as one of the only particularly strong characters is Vivien Harmon (played by Connie Britton), and even after the third episode, it’s starting to become apparent that the inferior writing is holding her back.  Outside of Vivien, the only character of note is Constance, the next door neighbor who is played by Jessica Lange.  Lange does well to make the character seem like quite the b**** that has plans that will continue regardless of if the Harmon’s are in the way or not.  By the end of the third episode, her motives are a bit clearer, but once again, she falls to the syndrome of trying to build a great performance off of subpar lines.  The last character that I want to talk about is Dr. Ben Harmon (played by Dylan McDermott), who is an ailing psychiatrist who runs his work out of his home.  There are a few quirks that he has, such as seeing the house maid as 20 something years old whereas everyone else sees her as in her mid 60s, but his deliverance is boring and his motives are absolutely non-understandable.  For example, for some god awful reason, he decides to have his psychiatry practice in his house.  I don’t know about you, but if I were dealing with people with psychological problems, I WOULD NOT HAVE THEM IN MY HOUSE. What if one decides to attack the Dr. and his family?  What if a family member walks in and disrupts? It just doesn’t make any sense whatsoever, and the show does absolutely nothing to describe why it is that way.

Dr. Ben is SO brooding

The thing is that I really want to like American Horror Story.  Up until this point, there really haven’t been many horror based television shows, so to see one pop up made me hope that it would succeed.  Unfortunately, it ends up getting plagued by too many problems to really take off, and while the horror and intrigue is there, AHS doesn’t seem like a show that will ever take off in the vein of LOST unless they make some major changes.

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