The Cutprice Guignol

At a certain point, I only have myself to blame.

I have been writing about Ryan Murphy shows for – well, if you make me think about that, I’ll have to take a break from this article to howl into my cat’s fur about the passage of time, so we’ll breeze by the specifics. But I have been writing about Ryan Murphy shows for a long time, and, in that time, despite the goodwill Glee somehow instilled in me, I have mostly come to hate them. From Nip/Tuck to Scream Queens to American Sodding Horror Story, his shows have this unique skill of sounding like the kind of nonsense I’d actually enjoy, and starring various actors I really love, only to go screaming off the rails into indulgent, overwritten, bloated bullshit by the first mid-season break.

But, you know, it’s been a while since I stopped covering American Horror Story, after the one-two punch of Apocalypse and 1984 left me bereft of all belief in genre television. I’ve successfully dodged the Monster series, given how much I’ve hated his handling of true crime in the past. And, when I saw the chat about Grotesquerie, his new Halloween-season release co-created and written with Jon Robin Baitz and Joe Baken, I figured – well, maybe it’s time to give him another try, eh?

Because that’s the thing – there’s always just enough to recommend a Ryan Murphy show. There’s usually a great cast (certainly on display here, with Niecy Nash-Betts, Courtney B. Vance, and Lesley Manville serving as the big hitters in terms of acting clout, and Travis Kelce is here, being marginally better than I expected), an interesting premise (hyper-gory crime horror about a spooky serial killer), some suitably excellent direction (courtesy of Max Winkler and Alexis Martin Woodall, so far) – enough to just lull me beyond that point of remembering how much I hated Apocalypse. You know?

Long story short, I gave it a go. And let me tell you: I shouldn’t have! There is so much great genre TV kicking around at the moment (if you’re looking for some recommendations) that it feels almost vaguely insulting that this is what’s getting the big push this Halloween season. Despite everything it has going for it, it, fundamentally, can’t overcome the issue that has plagued so many of Ryan Murphy’s shows in the past: that fucking dreadful writing.

It’s not all on him, obviously, given that he has two co-writers for this season, but the problems that made themselves clear within the first twenty minutes and only got worse from there are the same ones that have played out over and over again in Murphy’s previous shows. Fundamentally, I think it comes down to a lack of trust in the audience – because this is a show that revels in being extremely violent, outright gross, deliberately packed with the most unpleasant and nasty shit you could possibly imagine (well, unless you saw the last season of Slasher, but I digress) – it’s fair to say that this show is well and truly aimed at adults.

Not that you’d know that, with the way that Murphy and his co-writers insist on leading you by the hand through every scene, leaving not a thematic stone unturned to make certain that we really understand everything that’s going on here. I’m not sure if it’s just an attempt to pad out the already-bloated runtime, or if the creators really have so little confidence in the audience picking up on the subtext that they feel the need to have their characters spell it out in no uncertain terms. With such great actors capable of imbuing meaning into these words as it is, it feels downright patronizing (and pointlessly time-consuming) to have them essentially look straight down the lens and tell us precisely what’s going on here and what motivations these characters have. It’s beyond exposition, and into live reading of character bios from the show’s Wiki.

Grotesquerie is an annoying show that wastes exquisite talent – but more than that, it’s just really, really predictable. It’s a reminder that Murphy’s bad writing habits are just as present as they ever were, and, no matter how much gore you pile on them, it’s not enough to cover up this hacky nonsense.

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(header image via The Guardian)