AHS NYC: A Good Season of Television, A Bad Season of American Horror Story
When American Horror Story first burst onto screens in 2011, it was markedly different from anything else on TV at the time. Notable for its divided reception, and universally hailed as undeniably camp, the Ryan Murphy production has since come to occupy a unique place in American pop culture. For those unfamiliar with this low-level fever dream, the show features a (largely) repeating ensemble cast, with each season telling a different horror story, usually influenced by tropes of the genre; past seasons have centered around witches, haunted houses, serial killers, clowns, cults, and more.
The eleventh season of American Horror Story, AHS NYC, is moody and gritty. The color palette is washed out; the setting is industrial. The plot revolves around a darker, more sophisticated mystery than the show’s audience has come to expect, and the tragedies of life and death are treated with more weight than ever before. The aesthetics are breathtaking, and the writing is very strong. But somehow, NYC falls flat.
American Horror Story NYC departs from the typical formula with a slightly different blueprint and a noticeably different tone. One element that separates NYC from the rest of the show is that it no longer borrows from a broad horror movie trope. (The season that functions as the best example of this phenomenon is AHS 1984, which draws on 1980s summer camp slasher movies—Friday the 13th, the Burning, and my all-time favorite low-budget disaster, Sleepaway Camp.) Instead, NYC seems much further removed from the pop-cultural milieu of the rest of the series, borrowing very heavily from a singular source. Without much subtlety, AHS NYC takes and takes from William Friedkin’s film Cruising. The film and the season follow almost the exact same plot: a closeted/ambiguously gay cop goes undercover in the queer nightlife of ‘80s New York to catch a serial killer who is murdering men in the leather scene. Beyond these similarities, there is a practically shot-for-shot recreation of a scene from Cruising, which didn’t make very much sense in that film, and makes even less here. A muscular, mustachioed Black man (both Cruising and NYC have majority white casts) wearing only a jockstrap and cowboy hat enters a room where the main character is being interrogated and slaps him so hard he falls out of his chair. The remake of this scene feels a little disingenuous and seems only to be included so that NYC feels more like an Easter egg-filled ode, rather than a rip-off of a film that never quite got the attention it deserved.
Similarly to the stripped-back approach to genre study found in NYC, the season also half-heartedly continues the established trend of recycling past cast members, although there are none of the big-name recurring actors who have become the face of the show—think Sarah Paulson, Evan Peters, Jessica Lange, Taissa Farmiga, or Emma Roberts. The only cast members brought back from previous seasons (or at least the only ones of note) were Zachary Quinto (AHS Murder House and Asylum), Billie Lourd (AHS Cult, Apocalypse, and 1984), and Leslie Grossman (also Cult and 1984). Quinto is great here as Sam Jones. (Sidebar: Is that a Sex and the City reference?) Quasi-reprising his role as serial killer Oliver Threadson from AHS Asylum, he gives a chilling performance and made me viscerally uncomfortable when he was on screen. Lourd is pregnant, sweet, and determined to help people as Dr. Hannah Wells, but the role doesn’t quite manage to be interesting, doing a disservice to Lourd, who played some deranged women really well at earlier points in the show. Leslie Grossman, who has played great villains on the show, feels equally wasted playing the anxious and needy ex-wife of the main character.
This brings me to another issue I have with this season: it is by far the most male-dominated of American Horror Story. While this is not necessarily a problem in and of itself, AHS derives so much of its infamous camp from the frankly ridiculous female characters who have had a large hand in making the show what it was at its best. As such, the quiet, masculine energy of NYC makes for good, brooding television, but does not feel like a season of American Horror Story in the slightest. Aside from the aforementioned Lourd and Grossman characters, the only other women in the story are a trio of lesbians who show up periodically to annoy and chastise the gay male characters. These three felt particularly out of place, not really adding anything, but feeling reminiscent of negative lesbian stereotypes.
This is all to say that this well-made, strange, flawed piece of work is not a season of American Horror Story. It desperately wants to be something else. A readaptation of Cruising, a standalone piece of television, the first part of a decidedly more serious anthology. But NYC cannot succeed at both telling a tender, interesting story, and satisfying the American Horror Story audience.