American Horror Story

"... The show has been panned by many critics and not just hated—it’s been mocked, it’s been scorned, and praised mostly on the basis that it’s “so bad it’s good.” The online recappers at the A.V. Club gave it a D while claiming they couldn’t stop watching it. But I’m hooked on it as much as I am on Homeland, and I don’t mean that in an ironic way. It’s definitely not because I trust the series’ co-creator, Ryan Murphy, the famously exasperating showrunner of Glee and Nip/Tuck and Popular. He’s a TV-maker who’s shown over and over that he can take a brilliant premise and smash it like a toy he’s gotten tired of.


But he hasn’t run American Horror Story into the ground just yet. Instead, he’s made the one show this season that feels brazen and exciting—hard to look away from and Glee-fully unafraid to offend. The premise is Horror 101: An unhappily married couple, Ben and Vivien Harmon, played by Dylan McDermott and Connie Britton, are fleeing a bad past. Ben, a shrink, cheated with a student; Vivien had a late miscarriage. Along with their sulky teenage daughter, they move into a Los Angeles mansion so caked with tabloid crime that it’s on the route of a local “murder house tour.” Whoops! Murphy makes visual references to seventies horror classics like Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist, and Halloween, and the goal here isn’t to make you feel smart, it’s to get you squirming: to jump and cringe and laugh."
(excerpt from NYMagazine, Shock Value, by Emily Nussbaum - for full article: http://nymag.com/arts/tv/reviews/american-horror-story-nussbaum-2011-11/)

I'd say AHS is like an episode of "Masters of Horror" that didn't end for 12 hours.  I concur that it was "...brazen and exciting—hard to look away from and Glee-fully unafraid to offend." 

Having finally had time with the hubby to sit down and watch the DVR, the first season of AHS has concluded.  I find it hard to believe the contradictory nature of some of its reviews.  The Hollywood "scare with gore" technique has numbed us to the subtle nuances of true horror.  Nussbaum references classic horror movie as an excuse to ignore the show for its brilliance.  It's hard to imagine the same man who produces the gooey, over-done and unimaginative Glee to have produced this transcendent piece of horror art; each passage was better than its predecessor.

An appeal from an AHS devotee, Ryan Murphy... make the next season as satisfying as, if  not superior to, the first.  Eagerly awaiting the next trip to Murder House.