By Julieanne Smolinski
We've come to expect certain things from Ryan Murphy, just like we've come to expect certain tropes in our scary television shows: parts in jars, dead animals, questionably ethical use of special needs children for creepy effect, Lea Michele. I know Murph-dog and co-creator Brad Falchuk are responsible for Glee and Nip/Tuck, so I figured what I was going to get from An American Horror Story was an uncomfortable three-way between The Practice, Friday Night Lights, and the video for "Enter Sandman," set to an earsplitting cover of "Can We Still Be Friends?" by a shrill gay teen. And some of that we get.
Murphy's bloody jazz hand fingerprints are all over this thing. The characters are a liiiiiiittle broadly drawn and prone to paroxysms of melodrama, and there are a lot of beats where you can picture Falchuk and Murphy excitedly capping the dry erase pen and high-fiving each other before taking a break for celebratory "nailed it" scones.
Take the flashback opener, ostensibly set in 1971, which, I didn't look, but I'm guessing is listed on the Wikipedia page for "Notably Creepy Years." America loves nothing more than the grisly murder of redheaded children, so Ryan Murphy nicely doubles our pleasure by offing a mouth-breathing pair of ginger sociopaths who don't get that you should never go into a haunted house after a little girl with Down syndrome tells you not to. But these kids have obviously never seen The Shining and won't be put off by anything as foreboding as Down's Girl or a semi-dead opossum or a BABY HEAD IN A JAR. I mean, obviously these children are bad because they're going through a house destroying really lovely stained-glassed windows with an abandon that would absolutely KILL your hippie aunt, but can they get some points for bravery? Not phased by the baby head in the jar? But just when it looks like someone should get these kids jobs in The Hurt Locker, something in pancake makeup offs them while Ominous Down's Girl looks on scornfully, like, "Ha-ha, should have rented The Brood, idiots!" Always listen to the person with Down syndrome in a Ryan Murphy show, kay? (It's worth noting that Ominous Down's Girl is only Ominous Down's Actor Np. 1, here, mind you, and we're only on episode one. I think it's safe to say that at this rate, if you're an actor with Down syndrome, go ahead and put down cash on that BMW you've wanted to buy your dad, because you're all going to eat out for months over this show. In fact, if you have any kind of physically apparent chromosomal abnormality, Ryan Murphy probably will have a role for you as a "Harbinger of Doom No. 3" in the coming months. He's like the condescending FDR for people with congenital defects.)
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