Nothing isnt political in 2017.
We watch television the same way we watch our fellow Americans, searching for hidden signals and revelatory telltales.
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So look now toAmerican Horror Story, this decades funny-scary symphony of kitchen-sink national terror.
Its election day, 2016, in a small town in Michigan.
Ally (Sarah Paulson) and Ivy (Alison Pill) cant believe what TV is telling them.
Donald Trump appears on their television, grinning, newly-Presidented, and theAHSsoundtrack swells with hilarious terror.
He doesnt believe what hes seeing, either.
Seek subtext if you desire.
The joke is that theyrebothcrazy, and we all are, too.
Its a dynamite opening.
The episodes that follow are strange, circuitous, too anxious to really pursue that initial madness.
Allys on edge, brought low by phobias that disappeared sometime around 2008.
Shes scared of holes, see, and clowns: More on that later.
She keeps meeting Kai, whos meandering through town with his own strange purposes.
Nothing he says makes sense, unless youre watching the news.
Meanwhile, Ally and Ivy start to have personnel problems at their restaurant.
New neighbors move in across the street, and they have bees.
When their Hispanic nanny disappears did she flee?
they hire Winter (Billie Lourd), a coed still recovering emotionally from the election.
Sorry, yes, what, right: clowns!
Twisty (John Caroll Lynch) reappears fromFreak Show, for no apparent reason beyond hysterical continuity.
And there are more clowns, lingering in the shadows, with weird makeup and curiously potent strategies.
And Im aware that tonally destructive might sound funny given how ferventlyAmerican Horror Storycycles through film styles.
Sometimes the excess is the point.
You could feel the wave crashing.
Last yearsRoanokerepresented something more stripped down, less Grand Guignol.
The mockumentary style was constricting, and encouraged the shows broadest meta-Hollywood gags.
But it was also a throat-clearing moment for the show, more modest in scope.
(One episode ofRoanokeran 38 minutes without commercials, whereasHotels runtimes could swell to 50 minutes or more.)
That continues inCult, to a point.
But the first three episodes released by FX feel built around some unnecessary teases.
There are some intriguing performances on the margins.
The new neighbors are Billy Eichner and Leslie Grossman, married despite his open homosexuality.
and Grossman especially seems to grasp onto the shows wavelength, funny and scary and confidently desperate.
And there are the omnipresent clowns.
Paulson and Peters are electric the few times theyre onscreen together, two political-extremist poles that magnetically attract.
