With the series belaboring the freaks’ theoretically unexpected likability at every possible turn, it’s the villains who stand to walk away with Freak Show.
Creators Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk seem to forget that if everything is “shocking” and “subversive,” then nothing is.
With “Edward Mordrake (Part 1),” Freak Show plays to its strengths, sounding its themes through action rather than talk.
It allows us to leisurely soak in the considerable atmospherics of Elsa’s financially imperiled Cabinet of Curiosities.
It’s clear that creators Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk have returned ready to play.
Freak Show is an excuse for American Horror Story to literally let its freak flag fly higher and prouder than ever before.
“The Seven Wonders” finds Coven largely tending, predictably for the most part, to a final bit of plot bookkeeping.
The penultimate episode of Coven finds the series still desperately scrambling to introduce busy conceits.
It’s fair to say that Coven has evolved in a fashion opposite to that of the prior Asylum.
It behaves as the TV equivalent of what Quentin Tarantino once deemed a “hang out movie.”
This week’s episode of Coven steers the series into unexpected and retrospectively logical narrative and thematic directions.
“The Sacred Taking” finds the show’s variables nearly, but not quite, cohering into a grand narrative arc.
Straight males may have found themselves in the position of actively envying two dead men while watching this week’s episode.
In this week’s episode of Coven, an elegantly interlocking series of plot turns suggests a major character’s undoing.
Creators Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk suffer few indulgences of sentimentality.
This week’s episode of Coven is ideally timed to remind us that Halloween was once a dangerous pagan event.
There’s a moment late in “The Replacements” that indirectly addresses a curiosity I’d already had in regard to Coven.
It finds creators Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk settling into a relative groove after bursting furiously out of the gates last week.
American Horror Story has evolved over the course of two seasons from a reliably lurid soap to a sophisticated work of despairing protest pop-art.
The rage of women is always just below the surface of Coven, and one gets a sense here that it won’t stay buried for long.