“Magical Thinking” finds the series resorting to its usual bag of boring, hyperbolically over-plotted tricks.
“Orphans” finds Freak Show taking a surprisingly earnest detour from its usual preachy, ultra-violently “relevant” shenanigans.
The episode is intended to remind audiences who Freak Show’s denizens precisely are before a break for the Thanksgiving holiday.
“Bullseye” sports a tempo that’s decidedly slow, obsessive, and damn near ponderous for Freak Show.
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.
Ultimately, the time-traveling conceit feels like a shameless ploy to further expand the franchise’s narrative universe.
The title of the film is a pretty obvious double entendre, but it does efficiently convey the good intentions behind this scattershot production.
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.
This week’s episode of Coven steers the series into unexpected and retrospectively logical narrative and thematic directions.
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.
Emma Roberts takes on the difficult task of convincing an audience to root for an obnoxious, self-obsessed aspiring poet.