WARNING: CONTAINS SPOILERS
American Horror Story: Freak Show now has just 5 episodes left of its 13 episode season and I wish I could say I was looking forward to it, but I'm not. I'm shocked by just how much I've lost interest because the season got off to a pretty solid start.
I was excited for Freakshow going into it. It brought back a bunch of great actors (Jessica Lange, Kathy Bates, Angela Bassett), added in Michael Chiklis (The Shield) who I think is one of the top 5 greatest actors in tv history, and had an interesting concept. To me, the treatment of the deformed is one of the most acceptable forms of discrimination present in the world today so I was eager to see how the show tackled this issue. I was even more excited when I saw that actual "freaks" were casted such as Jyoti Amge and Mat Fraser.
I'm not exactly in love with American Horror Story. I don't think it's as smart as it thinks it is but I think the acting is excellent and it's a lot of fun in a campy sort of way. So I basically had similar expectations for this season, though I was eager to see how the freak concept would be handled.
John Carroll Lynch as Twisty The Clown
Then Twisty died after four episodes.
I've seen many shows set up storylines and characters that seem like they're going to be sticking around for awhile only to abruptly end. Some examples include The Shield, Deadwood, and The Walking Dead. When I see a storyline abruptly end or a character get abruptly written out, I'll typically hold my criticism until I see what happens as a result of it. I was disappointed Twisty died so soon but perhaps it would give the show a chance to evolve into something even better.
But it didn't. It became an "open plot" so to speak. A lot of stuff was happening, yet nothing felt really important in the long run, or at least not enough for me to care. I've joked that the American Horror Story writers tend to throw a lot of shit at the wall and just see what sticks, but it feels really true right now, except nothing is sticking.
And in a typical American Horror Story fashion, there is a LOT going on at once. We've got Dandy, the spoiled man-child who's become a serial killer with a grudge against the freaks. It's obvious that Dandy is supposed to be annoying so I'll give Finn Wittrock a few points for his performance but Dandy is also so flat and just not interesting to watch. There's Stanley and Maggie, the con artists looking to murder and/or capture the freaks to sell them to a museum. Dell Toledo and his wife Desiree, a strong man and intersexed person respectively who are new to the freakshow. Except Dell is gay and Desiree is actually 100% female. Evan Peters plays Jimmy, who's more or less the show's moral compass and straight man which is pushed even farther from giving him the considerably less obvious deformity of syndactylys (since the camera rarely focuses on his hands). He's also Dell's son though he doesn't initially know this. Kathy Bates plays Ethel, a bearded lady, Dell's ex-wife and Jimmy's mom. She's second in command at the freakshow but seems to be the voice of reason. Then we got Belle and Dot, conjoined twins with a single torso, one pair of arms and legs, but two necks and heads and very different personalities. Dot wants a surgery to be separated from Belle which DOESN'T MAKE ANY SENSE because they share one torso. And we have Jessica Lange hamming it up as Elsa, the German head of the freakshow and secret amputee.
Worst of all, the show has slowly gone away from its best storyline, the unsubtle discrimination the freaks receive at the hands of others. I don't have any problem with showing conflicts within the freakshow but it would really challenge the audience to show the discrimination of a group they probably can't identify with (and possibly even forcing them to confront their own prejudices towards "freaks"), rather than showing the squabbles within the group and allowing the audience to not have to feel particularly bad about any of it.
Some might say "well the characters aren't supposed to be likable" and I agree. But I should feel something for them. I found several characters on The Shield to be unlikable including its protagonist, Vic Mackey, but I still was intrigued by Vic's journey throughout and wanted to see what choices he made and what the consequences would be. There have been several characters on Sons of Anarchy who I've hated and wanted to die, but that just shows how much of an impact the show has to make me feel that way. I'm not getting that with Freakshow. I don't like them enough to want them to live, I don't hate them enough to want them to die (maybe Dandy just because he's so goddamn annoying) and I don't really care about their experiences. The most recent episode, Blood Bath, certainly lived up to its title by killing off two main cast members, Kathy Bates and Frances Conroy. As a major fan of both actresses, I thought this would have more of an impact on me, but it didn't. I still didn't care.
Besides that, the season is throwing in typical shock value content like having a guy sit on a toilet seat covered in nails (a scene that served no purpose other than to give a character a random backstory that still doesn't give them any more depth) and a young woman is kidnapped and forced to participate in an orgy with the freaks while heavily drugged (a scene that has some really unfortunate "It wasn't rape. She liked it" implications).
We still have 5 episodes left so I'm hoping things can turn around but at this point I'm not really looking forward to Wednesdays.
Written by Alex Bauman
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