Hollywood, CA: Heralded as one of the best dramatic horror series since HBO’s Carnivale by absolutely no-one and ABC’s Dark Shadows by co-creator Ryan Murphy, American Horror Story seemed poised to help create a solid foundation for the television genre with help from AMC’s The Walking Dead. The combination of ghost story, adultery, and Jessica Lange was a cohesive equation, which was proven by way of Golden Globe nominations.
It was in the final episodes, however, that the series took a turn for the overly dramatic, so much so that visual scare tactics became glazed over, and then ridiculed. When the Harmons began their Beetlejuice-esque haunting in order to scare away the new family that had moved in, while Violet and Tate continue with their angst-ridden relationship. Luckily, all of this may have been planned.
“Everyone forgets that Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk are the creators of GLEE,” stated television writer Blaine Drucker. “The first proposed scripts that I saw portrayed a group of ghosts living together in a house, each with their own dreams and drives. It was essentially a horror version of Melrose Place.”
While the scripts and characters of American Horror Story and Melrose Place may not fall in line word for word, there seemed to be acute similarities between the two series besides melodrama: both series have cheating doctor-husbands; both have young adults in the trials of love; both have a lot of sex; both have gazebos; both have everyone baby-crazy. The list goes on.
“It’s not just that the script changed the words ‘apartment complex’ to ‘house’ and the word ‘living’ to ‘dead’. The dramatic, face-palm inducing activities of the ghosts all but rendered the show infertile, so to speak,” continued Drucker. “Once we meet Tate’s devil son, you might as well have a G.I. Joe ‘Knowing Is Half The Battle’ segment to mop up the cliche.”
Luckily, not all critics believe Drucker’s ideas, as another rumor has surfaced that American Horror Story was planned to be like MTV’s The Real World except with ghosts picked to live in a house and work together, and have their after-lives taped to find out what happens when the dead stop being polite.