Being fearless with a series allows you to take it as close to the edge as possible. It allows you to also go way over the edge time and time again.
Having pushed the ick factor on “Nip/Tuck” many times, Ryan Murphy has pretty much stayed in Ick City for the entirety of “American Horror Story.”
For its first season finale Wednesday, it unleashed just about everybody ever murdered in the death house and chased a naïve young couple around to scare them out of the place — a season’s work done in half an episode’s time.
Just about everybody who started the series is now dead, but not going away anytime soon since they are ghosts all trapped in the mansion of mayhem. And it’s getting more crowded all the time.
New details about the nature of these deaths seem to be written as each episode rolls by. Trying to explain it all may take a couple more seasons, if you can last that long.
Me, I’m not sure I can stick around that much longer since the end of the finale Wednesday flashed forward three years to when the baby born on the show just last week has turned into a murderous killer at age three. That his father is Nate seems to inform the character trait.
One of the worst aspects of “Horror Story” is that Murphy and his writers seem to want to play the murderous Nate as a charming rogue, rather than the creepy serial killer he actually is.
Jessica Lange seems alone among the cast to live up to its gothic excess, a trait she may have learned in “Grey Gardens.” The rest of the grownup cast now looks sort of sheepish — feeling perhaps vaguely silly for being there at all, especially now that they’re stuck as spirits.
I think it’s Tate, not Nate.