I wrote earlier this week about American Horror Story: Asylum, and how for me, the show is most effective when it brings out the monstrous in human behavior rather than when it trots out the whole, bloody bag of horror tricks. But as always, I enjoyed talking to my podcast partner Asawin Suebsaeng of Mother Jones, who’s much, much fonder of scary violence than I am, and hearing what he has to say about the show’s execution:

Also in this week’s edition: more on Alex Cross and discussions of Happy Endings and Don’t Trust The B—- In Apartment 23, which blessed event I am so ridiculously excited for.

This post discusses some extremely basic plot points for American Horror Story: Asylum.

Of all the genres I wish I appreciated more, the one I have the most regret about is horror. An early encounter with an extremely violent graphic novel version of Frankenstein gave me childhood nightmares and a life-long aversion to being deeply frightened by my entertainment. I mustered up the courage to see my first horror movie, Drag Me To Hell, several years ago for a long piece on the recession in movies, but nothing’s pulled me back since. I’m aware that in staying away from horror, I’m cutting myself off from a tradition that’s rich with explorations of our darkest social anxieties and pathologies, from violence against women to immigration. But it’s been very difficult for me to justify subjecting myself to images that upset me so deeply to get to the substantive ideas expressed by them.

Somewhat to my surprise, this season of FX’s anthology series, American Horror Story, is prompting me to try again. The second mini-series from creator Ryan Murphy, this time set at an insane asylum in 1964 New England overseen by the Catholic church, with its central mystery the identity of a killer of women who skins his victims, is at the very outer limits of my tolerance for violence. But its exploration of sexual taboos and repressed desires is more deeply felt and certainly as frightening as Bloody Face, as the killer’s been dubbed by a morbidly obsessed public, and much more interesting than the buckets of blood and organs sloshing around in the space between those themes.

At first glance, it looks like American Horror Story is pitting the mostly-innocent and not necessarily insane inmates of Briarcliff Asylum against its proprietors, most notably the severe Sister Jude (Jessica Lange). There’s Shelley (Chloe Sevigny), incarcerated as a nymphomaniac, her head shaved for punishment, mostly on the grounds that she has a high sex drive. “Men like sex and no one calls them whores. I hate that word. It’s so ugly,” she tells Dr. Arthur Arden (James Cromwell), who appears to have a more serious set of problems than some of his patients. “I like sex. It’s my crime.” Kit Walker (Evan Peters, one of the few returning members of the original American Horror Story cast) is a young man, newly and secretly married to his African-American wife, when he experiences what appears to be an alien abduction, she is brutally murdered, and he is arrested on suspicion of being Bloody Face. “Did her dark meat slide off the bone easier than any of the other victims?” Sister Jude asks him nastily at his intake session.

And then there’s Lana Winters (Sarah Paulson), a journalist relegated to the recipe column who comes to Briarcliff, ostensibly to write up Sister Jude’s famous bread bakery, but is using the assignment as cover to try to get a coop on the Bloody Face story. After an accident at the asylum, Sister Jude has her put in a cell, first telling Lana it’s so she can recover, but later blackmailing Sarah’s lover, Wendy (Clea Duvall), a young school teacher who fears having her sexual orientation exposed and being fired, into having Lana committed. “You have no legal standing,” Sister Jude tells Wendy. “I have a moral standing,” Wendy protests, seeing defeat already but determined to have her say. “Moral. That’s an interesting word,” Sister Jude tells her. The heartbreak of that decision, which Wendy immediately recognizes as an error, is the truest emotional beat in a new season with a fair number of them, mostly because it relies on real social conditions rather than lights in the sky or people made up as freaks to achieve a profound sense of fear and despair.
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It’s not as if characters never leave television shows. Diane and Fraiser both left Cheers, the former for California, the latter for a spinoff. Dr. Addison Montgomery departed Seattle Grace for the bright lights and beaches of Los Angeles. Detective John Munch has transcended franchises, moving from Homicide to Law & Order and popping up everywhere from Arrested Development to the X-Files. But it seems to me we’re entering a period where scripted television feels unusually confident about replacing characters or even entire casts.

The most high-profile case may not have been voluntary or planned: CBS subbed in Ashton Kutcher for Charlie Sheen on Two and a Half Men, ending the latter character’s run on the show with a fast and not particularly deep workaround. But it came at a time when lots of television shows were deciding that setting and concept were more important than individual characters. The Office saw the departure of Michael Scott, and if the show has seemed creatively moribund since his last episode, its problems really began once Jim and Pam got together. The core cast of the show may change further if Mindy Kaling’s show gets a pickup at Fox, ending her run on NBC as Kelly Kapoor. While it may not be totally clear what’s happening with Glee next year, some of the cast seems likely to depart, whether for a spinoff, or for other projects as graduation approaches for some of the kids at McKinley High. American Horror Story was specifically designed, even if we didn’t know it at the beginning, to replace almost the entire cast every season. And while a new show the CW has ordered may end up following its main character over multiple seasons, its combat-in-the-arena storyline sounds like it could accomodate a whole new cast every season, if need be.

I’d imagine that some of this is driven by the success of reality television on two fronts. Audiences have clearly become comfortable with swapping out contestants and Housewives as long as their replacements continue to fill the same tropes as their predecessors, and in shows like Glee where the characters are more schtick than actual people, and where the structure demands turnover, it probably wouldn’t been too wrenching for audiences to see actors phased in and out. Making sure actors on scripted shows know they’re replaceable also serves another function: it makes the actors who really need the work less powerful in contract negotiations if they know the show is comfortable replacing them at any point. And phasing characters in and out makes it easier for big stars to commit to television shows without worrying about waking up fourteen years later and having everyone forget that they used to compete for Academy Awards. It might have seemed inexplicable that Connie Britton would sign up for a three-year run of eating brains and having ghost-sex, but as a season-long reset button that lets her remind people she’s something other than Mrs. Coach, it makes more sense.

What does it mean in terms of storytelling? I think that’s yet to be seen. While rotating casts do make most actors less critical in favor of setting, atmosphere, and the internal rules of the world that will govern all characters’ behavior, a few anchor characters will still be important. What bodes poorly for Glee and well for American Horror Story, to take the two rotating-cast-shows from the same creator, is that Glee’s tentpole is the increasingly unlikable and not particularly rational staff, led by Will Schuster, while Jessica Lange still has scenery to chomp as creepy Murder House neighbor Constance in American Horror Story. And the concepts have to be good: both Glee and American Horror Story, while neither show is my cup of tea, have concepts that provide procedural-like structures. Every week, songs will be sung or people will die horribly, and folks will turn in to hear those songs and watch those killings. All of which probably lends itself to a focus on episodic, rather than serialized, shows. It’s difficult for me to believe that anyone is tuning in to Glee because they’re deeply invested in and attentive to the coherence of Rachel Berry’s journey any more.

Does that mean we’re going to enter a period of sloppy storytelling? I hope not. Episodic doesn’t have to mean inconsistent. And moving characters along can give a show an emotional integrity it might not have otherwise. But if characters are going to move in and out of shows, the main motivation shouldn’t be to break the power of actors, but to tell specific kinds of stories.

Chloe Angyal and Jessica Wakemen, two feminist pop culture writers of whom I’m quite fond, went on Fox to declare that the ban on abortion in prime time television is officially over, and Jessica makes a particularly valuable point: “There is not much variety in abortion plot lines on TV. Too many shows fall prey to the ‘I was considering an abortion but then, oops, I fell down the stairs and lost the baby’ plot line, which is a total cop-out. Abortion should not be something that TV writers only bring up as a vehicle to make the woman have a miscarriage.”

And I think this is exactly right. Abortion shouldn’t just be portrayed as something that’s considered and then abandoned. Abortions shouldn’t only be performed by monstrous people — as they were in a recent episode of American Horror Story, which increasingly seems to suggest that the end of a pregnancy before term, whether by miscarriage, abortion, or murder, is the ultimate expression of evil — or even necessarily morally conflicted ones. And a character having an abortion shouldn’t always have to result in an emotional trauma plotline. I’m okay with all of those storylines — except for maybe the monstrous abortionist in the basement alternating between performing Frankenstein operations on pigs and performing abortions on starlets — but only if they’re not the only thing on television.

When arcs like these are balanced with stories about women who get abortions and treat them like the routine medical procedures that they are, then we’ll be making the kind of progress we need most. Much as is the case with getting diverse actors on television, there’s more to being truly diverse than checking off quota boxes. There is diversity within the black community. People have a range of experiences with abortion. We need this sort of second-order thinking for lots of kinds of stories, not just ones about pregnancy.

It’s not news that cable networks like to go with risky places with sex that their network competitors can’t, but I’ve been particularly interested in the contrast between where Homeland‘s decided to go, and the direction American Horror Story, which I’m watching because I like to do bad things to myself, has taken.

In American Horror Story, pretty much all the sex we know about has a creepy edge. Dylan McDermott’s Ben has sex with a psychology student while his wife is recovering from a miscarriage, deeply damaging his marriage. When he and Vivien, Connie Britton, finally have makeup sex, it’s sex that comes out of violence, slaps and shoves turned into kisses. There’s a gimp suit in the attic, and Vivian has sex with a man in it she assumes is Ben. Meanwhile, Ben is seeing their aged housekeeper as a luscious 20-something, and keeps ending up in compromising positions with her, including getting caught masturbating to thoughts of her by a burned-scarred former inhabitant of the house — and there’s some allusion that she’s undead. One of Ben’s patients fantasizes about Ben’s daughter, Violet. And their elderly neighbor, Constance, is apparently in the habit of seducing young aspiring models (I think it would be great to have more acknowledgment that people of all ages have sex lives, but it’s played for creeps). So far, these encounters are all signifiers and no substance. We have no sense of why Vivien might get excited by the prospect of sleeping with an anonymized, restricted version of her husband. No clue as to why a man who professes to love his wife and be traumatized by the death of their son in the womb is a serial cheat, other than, as he complains, they haven’t had sex in a year. When he breaks down crying while masturbating, it’s risible, not vulnerable.

By contrast, Homeland has similar scenes, but as Alan Sepinwall wrote, “Homeland is using these kinds of scenes to really illuminate character, showing the dark place Brody is and making Jessica more sympathetic in the process.” There’s no question that the sex scenes between Jessica and Nick are uncomfortable. In their first encounter after his return, she’s shocked by his scars, and by how aggressive he is during sex—she may be consenting, but she’s deeply uncomfortable and in other situations she probably wouldn’t be, a combination of emotions that’s much more vulnerable and lacerating than anything we’ve seen on American Horror Story so far. Similarly, the masturbation scene in the the third episode doesn’t have a creepy, burned-looking murderer staring up at Nick from the yard outside, but it’s also much rawer and more frightening. Something’s happened to Brody to make him not want to touch his wife, to reach for the best she can get, even if it means totally humiliating her, making her feel powerfully distant from him.

Taken together, the two shows are an illustration of something I think is important, that some networks have cracked and others just haven’t. It isn’t the presence of sexual or violent elements in a show that make it adult, in the sense of grown up. It’s what you do with them that counts.

The bridge is yours.

-PETA arrives at the logical destination of the journey it’s been on all these years.

-Seriously, can we make the Revolutionary War movie where George Washington fights off British bioweapons?

-Are reality camera crews any different from news reporters when it comes to distracting a team?

-Of course there’s a West Memphis 3 feature film already in the works.

-American Horror story looks reasonably attractive:

I’m not a Ryan Murphy fan — neither increasingly grim plastic surgery nor singing after-school specials are really my jam (though I love me some Brittany and Santana) — but I admit I’m intrigued by his new show, American Horror Story, about a couple who, in the wake of a miscarriage, move to Los Angeles for a fresh start only to find out that their new house is haunted. He’s already hit the obvious button with all his might by declaring that “the monster in the closet is infidelity,” which should be a change for star Connie Britton after the end of Friday Night Lights. And I’m less interested in this show in particular than in the possibility that it could take horror shows mainstream.

Glee succeeded less by founding a new genre of television show, or firmly establishing it for the first time, than by revitalizing a genre that’s had its ebbs and flows. America has always been pretty fond of its musicals. But with the exception of Twin Peaks, if that counts, I’m hard-pressed to think of a horror television show that a) develops a story from episode-to-episode rather than being a showcase for one-offs, b) that is considered a television classic, c) that is scary in the way that horror movies are scary and visceral. So American Horror Story, if it works, could break new ground even if it’s on cable TV rather than the networks, where you’d have to compromise quite considerable on sex and violence a la Buffy to avoid the wrath of the FCC.

I’m curious about horror in part because I have an extremely hard time watching it myself, and am tentatively working towards understanding it better. When I was quite young, a friend’s mother read me a graphic novel version of Frankenstein that shook me so deeply that I had very traumatic nightmares for a long time, and I tend to avoid the kind of imagery and scenarios that would trigger those kinds of dreams again. I’m trying to get better — I did survive all of Drag Me to Hell in theaters, and I’m planning to see the Straw Dogs remake, if that counts as horror. So take everything I’m about to say here with an enormous grain of salt.

But I do wonder if there’s something about horror that’s better suited for movies than for television. It’s hard to sustain the tension of a horror action sequences (is that the right thing to call murders? Or attacks?) from week to week if you’re cliff-hangering them. It’s a genre that involves getting incredibly wound up incredibly quickly and then getting a fairly quick release. It’s hard to buy the idea of a family staying in a house of horrors for a long time before they get killed or are driven out of it, unless the terrible things that happen to them are calibrated in such a way that they’re either drawn into the darkness or don’t realize what’s going on for a while. And I also wonder if some of the social issues that horror movies bring up, like extremely violent sexual assault, or violent crime, are the kinds of things that mass American audiences can only bear to look at for a short time, and which, psychologically, we need our pop culture to provide quick resolution to. There’s a difference between watching Doctor Melfi get raped, knowing she’s alive, and watching her struggle emotionally with the consequences of that assault over a television season; watching two teenage girls get raped, tortured, and violently murdered, only to have their parents rape, torture, and murder their killers in return for two hours in a movie theater; and watching extremely violent, or extremely tense things happen over 12 to 22 hours. For certain kinds of very bad things, we tend to demand that our pop culture anesthetizes us with distance, or salves us with revenge. It’s not that you couldn’t spread out I Spit On Your Grave over a 12-episode season, but would you want to?

Obviously Buffy worked, but that was in part because the show was very funny rather than straightforwardly frightening or shocking, because it was a procedural where at least some monsters were vanquished every episode, and because the special effects were calibrated at a point where they were immersive enough to suspend disbelief but not realistic enough to be genuinely disturbing. For American Horror Story, and any successors it has, I imaging much will depend on what tone the show settles on, and how precisely it manages to stay on whatever sweet spot it finds. Given Ryan Murphy’s tonal track record, that may be difficult.