Camellia Peebles
I want to love American Horror Story again. I need you to understand that before anything else, because it colors everything I am about to say. I loved this show once, fully and without irony, back when a haunted house or a coven could still surprise me. Then Hotel arrived and my enthusiasm cooled. Roanoke arrived and it curdled. From then on I watched it casually and was unfortunately always left wanting. For a long stretch after that my relationship with the series became a single word, repeated: no. So I came to the Season 13 premiere not as a hater but as a believer, arms crossed, waiting to be won back. Consider this a plea disguised as a review. Prove me wrong, Ryan Murphy.
The season’s pitch is nostalgia as event. This is the reunion the franchise has teased for years, a gathering of familiar faces from the show’s stronger early chapters. Our way back into this world is Ben (Joey Pollari), a soft-spoken hospice worker cursed, with almost cosmic irony, by a fear of the number 13. His girlfriend Kira (Madelaine Petsch), is his opposite, devoted to that same number with an obsessive love. And honestly, same. Ben, however, looks for it everywhere, counts it everywhere, and the season, being the 13th, obliges him at every turn.
Which brings me to the first problem, and it is not a small one. The number is the season’s organizing gimmick, and it is deployed with a heaviness that stops being clever almost immediately. Thirteen appears in sunflower spirals and tortoise shells, in vials and gate numbers and place settings, hammered so relentlessly that a motif meant to feel ominous starts to feel like a child who has just learned a word and will not stop saying it. There is a version of this that reads as playful self-awareness, the show winking at the audience watching its 13th year. There is another version that reads as a series congratulating itself for being able to count. Three episodes in, I could not always tell which one I was watching.
The larger issue is the void at the center. Ben is meant to be our anchor, the ordinary man through whom we re-enter this baroque universe, and he is the least compelling presence in every room he occupies. He plays essentially one note, and the writing gives him nothing else to play. I was not alone in feeling this. Midway through the premiere I turned to the room I was watching with and asked, plainly, whether anyone found him compelling. The answer was a collective shrug. When your point-of-view character cannot hold a living room’s attention against the pull of the legends circling him, that is a structural problem, not a matter of taste.
Because the legends do pull. Jessica Lange returns and is instantly, unmistakably herself, every dramatic gesture landing exactly as it did years ago. Sarah Paulson is back as the Supreme and hardly needs to announce it; her authority is simply understood. And Evan Peters, Murphy’s enduring muse, is everywhere, playing so many characters at once that the generosity starts to feel like indulgence. We all have muses. I am not sure this one needs to embody four people in three episodes to justify the affection. The talent surrounding Ben is exactly what makes his blankness so glaring.
The season looks, unmistakably, like a Ryan Murphy production, for better and worse. You could identify his hand from across the room: the crowding close-ups, the fish-eye lens pulled out yet again to warp a face or a hallway into something queasy. It is a signature, and signatures can be pleasures, but there is a point where a recognizable style tips into a director reaching for the same three tools because they are the ones nearest to hand.
One more note, and this one I make as someone versed in the symbolism the show is borrowing. The premiere leans hard on occult set dressing, an inverted pentacle here, Lucifer’s sigil there, a Baphomet worked into a tapestry so that it reads, to the uninitiated, as pure devilishness. It is worth saying that the familiar Baphomet image has carried associations with duality and balance in occult traditions; it is not simply a cartoon shorthand for evil, and the show knows perfectly well that most of its audience will not know the difference. The imagery is chosen precisely to frighten the people least equipped to read it. That is an old trick, and a slightly cheap one, and it makes lazy villains of symbols that mean something more interesting than fear. And this is not the first show guilty of using occult images as fear frosting.
And yet, I am still here, and I am still curious, which is more than I could say for several seasons running. There is a real question threaded through these first three episodes, the question of whether all this gathering is building toward something or merely parading what it remembers, and I want to know the answer badly enough to keep watching. That is not a small thing for a show I had given up on. Intrigued but wary is where I have landed. The crypt is open. Now show me there is a reason everyone came back, and not just that you could get them in a room. Don’t let me down, Ryan Murphy!
that’s it.