Jaslyn, who still has anxiety from a violent home invasion as a child, soon gets notifications that an unsettling man is at her front door asking to be let in, but when she opens it, nobody is there. Let’s take this garbage out to the curb.Following married couple Jaslyn (Gabourey Sidibe) and Bryce (Max Greenfield) after they move into a new house, American Horror Stories’ “Aura” quickly places the pair in a traumatic situation once Jaslyn buys an Aura home security device. Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk (who’s blithely promised more awfulness to come) have snickered long enough. It’s time to set free all these wonderful actors so they can go do worthier things. And American Horror Story Twitter is fun for the most part! But yeesh, last night’s episode sank to new depths. And, sure, I’ll concede that it has, in its way, been a source of visibility for gay people and stuff. The series has done a lot for a troupe of fantastic actors, many of them women otherwise frustratingly ignored by Hollywood. It’s a joke, one we’ve heard too many times and has been told far better elsewhere. And why should we care about any of this stuff, any of these people, anyway? American Horror Story is cheap, poseur nihilism masquerading as risqué taboo flouting. The wildly unnecessary rape aside, last night’s episode was astoundingly bad, jumping erratically between about nine different plot threads, arbitrarily slowing down and speeding up in such a way that it was impossible to stay focused on whatever the hell was happening. And Matt Bomer is cute, as is Evan Peters, and the long list of same-y white guys who’ve been dragooned into this debacle. And it is fun seeing actors like Denis O’Hare and Chloë Sevigny goofing around on TV. But at this point it’s impossible to see any value in the show’s lurid shocks. If there were anything resembling wit behind American Horror Story’s grotesquerie, I’d feel very different about that dreadful scene. Who doesn’t love the idea of a sordid, wicked, gay horror anthology series? That sounds great! I wish that existed! What we have instead is a show where Ryan Murphy can indulge his fantasies about hairless, pouting pretty boys, while punishing or otherwise marginalizing limp-wristers and cross-dressers, and where he and Falchuk can yuk it up together over a kitchen-sink style of Grand Guignolia that uses excess to mask its ineptitude. This sequence went on and on and on, graphically, while a baby-doll goth Sarah Paulson cooed in Greenfield’s ear. Because before I knew it, there was Greenfield, aping the bitchy swish, getting anally raped by some sort of zombie monster wearing a metal spike strap-on. I trusted that, even if he were playing extremes, he wouldn’t be a jerk about it. I was curious to see Greenfield’s attempt at playing what I assume was meant to be a gay man, because he’s funny and seems like a good guy. Let’s cut to the chase: when Max Greenfield, cutie patootie from New Girl and Veronica Mars, first swished onto the screen, bleached blond and practically voguing, I was naïvely excited. reached what I hope is its nadir with the Hotel premiere, a confusingly paced, self-indulgent episode that managed to offend in myriad ways. Always a juvenile, antisocial show, A.H.S. Something we need to bag up and throw away, or flush and forget. As demonstrated in the first episode of the show’s fifth installment, Hotel, American Horror Story is garbage. I may be a humorless square, a traitor to my camp-loving gay brothers and sisters, but so be it. To which I say pffffft, as loud as I can. But if you go much deeper than that, if you actually take issue with some of the things that American Horror Story says, well then, you’re being a humorless square, someone who just refuses to see Murphy’s (and Falchuk’s) campy, queeny gay sensibility for the arch, transgressive genius it is. Or you can bitch plenty about Freak Show, the fourth iteration, being a dull disappointment. Sure, sure, you can complain about how nothing in its second season, Asylum, made any damn sense. American Horror Story, Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk’s exhausting anthology series, has, almost since its inception, cleverly found a way to immunize itself against criticism.
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