(2 of 2)
Glee still has emotional punch, but intermittently; it can be one of the best shows on TV this week and one of the worst the next. The New Normal (co-created with Glee's Ali Adler) manages to pull off the same trick within each episode. The leads, Bryan (Andrew Rannells) and David (Justin Bartha), are something new in prime time: a gay couple whose relationship is not just sweet but believably, romantically hot. Yet the show morphs into a cartoon whenever it brings on their surrogate's grandmother Nana (Ellen Barkin), a multipurpose bigot who talks like Sue Sylvester in pearls.
Murphy says he wants The New Normal to be like All in the Family, dealing in current issues and provoking discussion. That aspiration is evident in, say, the class dynamic between Bryan and David and their hired baby mama, Goldie (Georgia King). But Murphy's characters can end up as the collateral damage in a barrage of cocktail-napkin ideas, changing tone and personality to suit the story of the week. Like a Damien Hirst--style conceptual artist or an outlandish pop star (he's called himself "the male Lady Gaga"), Murphy keeps his audience off balance. Given a choice between ludicrous and boring, he'll take ludicrous every time.
Yet Murphy's shows can also be affecting and exhilarating like little else on TV, precisely because of their manic illogic. Which helps explain why American Horror Story is presently Murphy's best series and--not unrelated--the most Murphy-proof. First, as a horror show, it's almost obligated to operate on a primal, irrational level. Second, it's an anthology; the story and characters change every year. Horror has rarely worked on series TV because its requirements--surprise and danger--are cramped by the exigencies of stability, continuity and keeping characters alive. Murphy (who made AHS with Glee co-creator Brad Falchuk) is happy to shed those constraints.
Season 1 was a kinky haunted-house/haunted-marriage story, with Ben and Vivien Harmon (Dylan McDermott and Connie Britton) trying to recover from his affair, in an L.A. mansion filled with the spirits of its murdered residents. Season 2, American Horror Story: Asylum, takes place in 1964 in a Catholic sanatorium for the criminally insane, presided over by a cane-wielding nun (Jessica Lange) and a depraved mad scientist (James Cromwell). It's The Exorcist meets Titicut Follies, with an intriguing theme of how sexual repression breeds violence. It also manages to work in a serial killing, vivisection and an alien abduction.
That's just in the first two episodes. Give it a week or two and maybe there'll be werewolves. AHS's ability to kill and resurrect itself before Murphian ennui sets in has kept it vital. To really enjoy Murphy's shows, you need to take their erraticness as a feature, not a bug. They may break down logically sooner or later, but at their best they work beyond logic, which is where AHS is happy to live (or die). The series is, to borrow a phrase from today's politics, an Etch A Sketch. It draws something baroque and outlandish, then shakes it up and starts again. Maybe it's the creation that you love best or maybe the destruction. Either way, just you wait: Ryan Murphy will have a new outrageous distraction for you, very soon.