American Horror Story Season 2

So, FX released the first set of teasers for the new season of the best (worst?) show of last year.

You can find them here.

They are hitting exactly the tone I hope the show keeps from its first season. Vaguely creepy, completely nonsensical, and batshit crazy. If AHS ever starts making sense, it will probably completely ruin the entire show.

I cant be the only one looking forward to this show more than any of the fall season, cant I?

I dunno if it's my TOP returning show, but it's up there. I'm like you - I hope it remains cuckoo bananas.

I can't like it enough..

Damn the first season was batshit insane.. Jessica Lange... Spock... Gay dead sex lawn decorations...

You got it right. It is the best worst show. Because, don't get me wrong, the entire first season was an abomination from an artistic point of view (the essence of horror is not a twelve year old child shouting scary stories directly into your orifices), but it was so fundamentally interesting to watch, just to see what happened, that it was enough all by itself. Hopefully, the next series is as interesting as the first one. I don't hate most of the casting that I've heard thus far, so that's a plus. I'm anticipating this thing returning just to see what Murphalchucky intend to do at me.

Here's a good (but spoilerish) summary of who is back and who they are now.

Oh - and if you missed it in the big Fall thread, this is coming back Wednesday under a new title (has the subtitle in it in the schedule download that I get) and series ID, so check your schedules to make sure that your season passes are set right.

Sigh... and it appears that Hulu won't be carrying the episodes this season (unless they just haven't updated their page), so I might be out. Does Amazon/Itunes sell episodes as they air? Because I MIGHT be willing to do $1.99 an episode for the entire season... This is not the first time that giving up cable has hurt me, but it is painful.

I didn't watch any of the first season, but the idea of a year-long anthology series was enough to get me interested in this one. It's completely trashy, and it's constantly teetering on the edge of being too campy. But somehow, it kind of works. Since the framing story bits with Maroon 5 guy were terrible, I'm assuming that the only reason it works is that the actors are all really good. And they're completely committed to it (no pun intended). You focus on the performances so you don't notice how cheesy the premise is, and then everything cuts so quickly that nothing's allowed to linger in your mind for too long.

Jessica Lange is awesome. I guess that shouldn't be surprising, but still.

I do wish Hollywood would let go of the quick-cuts-of-people-vibrating-means-they're-crazy cliche. It was briefly interesting in that House on Haunted Hill remake, but that was over a decade ago.

I was looking (because I'm thinking of canceling my satellite soon) and the closest I found was someone claiming that the first season appeared on iTunes the day after each episode aired. Since Hulu still doesn't have the first season -- weird, since Fox and NBC have major stake in hulu, right? -- I'd guess that you'd have better luck finding it on iTunes or Amazon before the season wraps up.

The first season was added to Hulu as it aired, so I was able to catch up on the series. Of course, I also had cable back then...

Yeah, you pretty much summed up the first season too, except from everything I hear, the second season is actually toning it down just a bit so that the show makes more sense. I loved the first season for exactly the reasons you describe.

Looks like season 2 is up now on iTunes and Xbox Video; I don't see it on Hulu or Amazon yet.

I'd heard that season 2 was "toned down" too, so I spent most of last night reading recaps of the season 1 episodes. I'm guessing that it's toned down in the "not making it up entirely as we go along" sense, since it still seems to be throwing every single horror movie (and sci-fi!) cliche they can think of into one thing.

Part of the fun is the fact that literally anything might happen on this show. Add in some terrific actors and that makes for an entertaining hour. Looking forward to Spock getting in there and chewing some scenery.

It's on Amazon... I just bought and watched it.

I didn't mean toned down in terms of content, but in the way you said it (not making it up as they go along). I almost think how they wrote the first season was they got all the writers in a room and told them "ok, write the craziest thing you can think of, but don't put your name on it. We are going to put them all in a basket, mix them up, then use ALL OF THEM". And freed from being embarrassed by being the writer who came up with "Dylan Mcdermott cries while masturbating naked while thinking of a hot french maid who's actually an old lady who's actually a ghost", every single writer wrote something nonsensical...

Also, season 2, pretty good so far! I do like the more common themes that seem to be running through the show, with an emphasis on repression. Every single character seems to be hiding something about themselves from everyone else.

So. First things first, this show didn't get any better, so if you were expecting that to happen, you are going to be sorely disappointed, but you were also being a little naive, because that's not how Rad Bryan Murphalchucky rolls. They don't get better. They just get louder. And they got louder. I will say that this premiere is much improved over the season one start, in that it is slightly less crowded, but it still has the distinct feeling of a five year old shouting scary stories into your ear through a bullhorn. All of the acting has now been promoted to "hammy as fuck," the exploitation knob was twisted right off the machine, and the DP seems to have taken his inspiration from an unexpected journey down a flight of stairs, but this, again, is not surprising. This is still one of the worst shows on television by any objective standard by which you would compare it to any other show on television.

It's also still very interesting to watch in that Axe Cop, what in the holy hell are these people about to do at me sort of way. I'm a little surprised to find myself quite liking Murder Son from the first season - he might be better at this whole acting gig than I originally gave him credit for. It will be similarly intriguing to see Zach Quinto back, though I do hope that he's not playing the cattiest homosexual in the world, if only because the man might get himself typecast out of more conventional roles.

So it's a decent start. I'd probably be happier overall if the camera would stay on a goddamn tripod and the whole thing felt a little bit less frantic, but I'm still watching it. I'm curious to see how the show intends to justify the present day and flashback structure, as right now the only reason for the present day stuff at all is to provide an excuse for boner-baiting, but I guess I'll just have to wait and see.

Fun fact - this season there's going to be a Christmas episode. For real. I'm a little worried.

I liked it. They've got a high caliber of actors this season, particularly James Cromwell, so the actors are definitely selling it. It's fun to see where the actors from last season that stayed on ended up.

The show is really getting good. It's amazing what you can do when you don't have to worry about censors. Or good taste, basic human decency, or plot coherence.

It's almost entirely the actors -- for instance, I don't think Chloe Sevigny is all that good an actress, but she's taken a long line of the cheesiest, one-note, ridiculous stuff and kept me from realizing how ridiculous it was until it was over.

It's also weird how they're turning it around for Sister Jude. She's actually turning into a sympathetic character.

My wife and I are on the verge of dropping it. Say what you want about last season but it made some sense.. You had the current time, the ghosts.. the flashbacks that fleshed out the back story of the murder house..

Here because almost all the narrative is from one point in time it just seems like chaos with a dash of whore.

Aliens - check
Mutated monsters - check
Demonic possession - check
BDSM? - check

Nazis and Nazi hunters - check
Lesbians in prison - check
Nymphomaniacs - check
Serial Killers - check
Snuff porn-loving mad scientists - check
"Aversion Therapy" hand jobs - check
The guy from Maroon 5 getting stabbed repeatedly - check

Why are you guys thinking of dropping it, again?

Loving it. Just when you think it can't possibly get any more bananas, Anne Frank shows up.

I haven't watched this yet. But I am going to now. It sounds awesome.

You're underselling it.

Anne MFing Frank, Nazi Hunter - check

All of the above plus Jessica Lange showing why she's won so many awards.

I fucking love Jessica Lange. She's amazing!

Also holy shit is this season uncomfortable at times.

Heh, I was halfway trying to avoid spoilers. But now I realize: 1) It's in the episode's title; 2) worrying about "spoilers" for this show is like worrying about spoilers for a fever dream; 3) "Anne Frank: Nazi Hunter" isn't spoiling, it's advertising.

I was trying to figure out the series yesterday, and I think I came up with my favorite analogy for it: it's like Axe Cop, if the writer weren't a 5-year-old boy, but a 13-year-old boy going through an extremely vivid puberty.

Also: Julieanne Smolinski's recaps on Vulture are quality from the title on down.

Here I will humbly neglect to mention that I have already observed the Axe Copishness of the whole thing.

The primary problem with this season is that it's not content to stick with one thing as the core issue. There was one thing in the first season - there was a haunted ass mother fucking house. And then Murphalchucky vomited forth their entire brainstorming session of ideas in a fat rush. This season, thus far, we've had:

1. Nazi Terror
2. Nunsploitation - Lange Style
3. Lesbian Panic
4. Murderboy
5. Possessionun
6. Murder Woods
7. The Maroon 5 Blow Job Murders. Well, technically Arm Severances, but let's not pick nits.

At this point, I suspect that there is very little chance that it all ends up tying back together into a single coherent thing the way the first season did.

8. ALIENS!

I swear it wasn't stealing; my eyes just start to glaze over when you use phrases like "Murphalchucky."

And done.

Damn. I keep forgetting about the aliens.

Man, I don't know. I like it fine when it's silly, not so much when it's silly and involves lady torture. Or turns from 50s B-movie horror into Saw.

I do, however, like the idea that a demon would possess a nun for the sake of pulling pranks on school children.

Brad. Ryan. A word. Do you know why anybody gave a fuck who Rubberman was last year? I'll give you a hint - it wasn't because he was such an awesome and mysterious villain that you created. It's because he did things that were interesting and had an effect on the plot. Now, show of hands - who even knows what Bloodyface is? I only know of him as the Maroon 5 Cockblocker, and I wouldn't have known that to be his name if it weren't in your program description, telling me what happened in the episode. And I think that he showed up in one scene in the sixties before now. This was not a particularly dramatic reveal, largely because you're trying to do too much. Nonetheless, I'll give you some credit - now we're down to Aliens, Nazis, Demon, and Skinhat. That's an improvement. I still don't really see how those all come together, but it's a start.

Well, everyone was talking about him in the first episode when Maroon 5 and his girlfriend were all 'Bloodyface, Bloodyface!' and then in the past when everyone accused Tate of being Bloodyface and he was all 'I'm not Bloodyface!' and people were like 'omg, it's Bloodyface!' So basically people who've been paying attention knows what Bloodyface is. Nobody else, though. Good catch.

That's odd. I don't remember hearing that particular name come up. It seems kind of period inappropriate for the sixties stuff. The Adam Levine thing is so far in the past that I could easily have forgotten that, but are they really actually using that name in the imagination history? That would feel weird to me. I actually thought that there wasn't any connection between the series of murders that Tate was accused of committing and any specific identity. Maybe that was way back in the first episode, when anybody was outside of the asylum. That seems like a very long time ago at this point. There is far too much stuff in this show.

Oh, I agree. Which is why it stuck with me.

Weird. I bow to your superior recall and retract my prior criticism of the producers. And I'll give the show credit for actually using the name of their costumed villain this time (now somebody can tell me that they called Tate Rubberman like eighty seven times in the first series). Though I still don't think of him as a particularly iconic figure at this point. For that matter, I don't really get the monicker - I mean, the mask is made of skin, but I don't remember much blood. Of course, I didn't remember the name either, so I should probably stop trusting my memory.

Hahahahahahaha, next week features the best stunt casting ever.

Bleh. Not a great episode. Way too many convenient coincidences. When Sarah Paulson didn't kill Zachary Quinto I winced. When she got in a car with a crazy person I rolled my eyes. When she ended up back at Briarcliff I just yawned.

Been enjoying this season, as completely bonkers as it is. But man. Guys. Please.

I can see why she wouldn't kill Thredson; she just wanted to get the hell out of there as quickly as possible. (Plus, an asylum escapee is kind of screwed if the killer isn't alive to confess). But then getting in the car with creepy William Mapother as yet another unhinged evil dude: that's going too far. Yes, in a show where a possessed nun argues with the Angel of Death and a mutant gets eviscerated with a meat slicer, her running from one crazy guy to the next is going too far. She is the World's Unluckiest Lesbian.

I thought the image of the Angel of Death was just great, and she was used really well. Plus I still like just about every scene with Sister Mary Eunice. But then there was the rape scene and all the wrist cutting. I know the whole schtick of the show is to cross the line, turn around, and pee on the line, but it still seems like they're mixing up goofy over-the-top with gross over-the-top.

I love the comment from the recap of the episode from Vulture.com:

There are shows that command attention (Breaking Bad), and there are shows that demand attention (Awake), and then there's shows that just sit in the corner and scream for attention but try to actively drive you away. You're getting there, American Horror Story. Because I really wasn't paying that close of attention on account of this show feels like just a stream of random bullshit flying into my input slots (oh look - Lily Rabe's in lingerie and singing the hits of the day at....I guess, Jesus, by proxy?), and now I have to jump back and watch the middle of the episode all over again to figure out what the fuck actually happened to Jessica Lange.

Oh. She pussied out. Okay.

See, the thing is, show, if you're going to require that I not look away from you for even a second, maybe you should stop boring me. Because that's what this is coming to. You've got all these different stories going in random directions, a bunch of arbitrary shit keeps happening (was there any runup at all to Sylar going at whasserface like that? I mean, other than him setting up his mommy issues, so, I mean, naturally he'd want to rape his mother? I mean, who doesn't? If AHS hasn't dived off the edge into the Scott Buck/Jeff Lindsay psychology cesspool, it's at least toeing the edge), and that's just boring after a point. It's why you don't sit and read all of Axe Cop, ever, in one sitting - there comes a point at which it stops being interesting and starts being boring. I thought that the first season actually handled that pretty okay near the middle, when it started drawing all that stuff together, but unless this is supposed to be some sort of weird crossover with Supernatural, I don't see how that's going to happen. And the real shame is that this could have been a really excellent episode of television. Granted, I couldn't help thinking that the Angel of Death was popping holy wood every time she fwoomped out all over the place, but still - that was a theme that you could have worked around much better than you did. I'm sad now. Maybe Arrow and Supernatural will expand my happiness.

There was leadup to the rape. It was heavily insinuated that he had sex with that dead body that he first associated with his mother. And in the previous episode when Lana called him baby as it faded out he was, uh, nursing.

It lost me with the Lana getting in a car with a crazy guy, but other than that I LOVED the Jessica Lange angle. Going to see the parents at the end. The look on the father's face (he totally knows). I also really liked the way the demon sought out the angel. I thought it was super interesting that just for a moment they made something that we've seen as being just totally powerful and evil be just a little bit vulnerable. And not as all powerful as might have been thought--it only knows what the people themselves know, even if that's false.

And I really liked the angel of death. I thought the wing effect was well done and striking.