A Company Convenes

During the opening, pre-title sequence of ‘Apocalypse’, the US anthology television series American Horror Story (AHS)'s first episode of its eighth season (ironically titled ‘The End’), we see the world all but destroyed by nuclear missiles. Only a select few are able to sequester themselves to a secret underground bunker, Outpost 3, to live out their remaining days under a bizarre rulesbased system that is both demanding and terrifying. On the first evening of their stay, the occupants of Outpost 3 sit down to a Gothic-banquet-inspired dinner where a company of familiar faces is brought together in this eighth act of television horror. Looking around the dinner table, we see actor Sarah Paulson playing the role of Wilhemina Venable, matriarch of the bunker. Up to this point, Paulson had appeared in every season of AHS, each time playing a different character. Evan Peters is also there – playing Mr Gallant (also in his eighth season). Kathy Bates plays Miriam Mead (in her sixth season and sixth role). Adina Porter plays the role of Dinah Stevens and Billie Lourd plays Mallory (both in their fourth season at that time). Leslie Grossman takes on the role of Coco (her second season), while there are AHS newcomers Kyle Allen and Ash Santos playing Timothy and Emily, respectively, Jeffery Bowyer- Chapman and Chad James Buchanan as lovers Andre and Stu, and, most surprisingly of all perhaps, Hollywood veteran Joan Collins playing the role of Mr Gallant's grandmother, Evie Gallant.

While these actors inhabit their characters consistently and singularly within the world of ‘Apocalypse’, the AHS audience who has travelled through its different seasons and stories inevitably frame a perception of each character through the journey of previous roles, generating multifaceted linkages which themselves resonate with the linkages afforded by the richly woven narratological lines that run vertically through the seemingly discrete seasons in the anthology. It is within these matrices of intertextual weaving encompassing actor and character, and character and past-and-future characters, that the AHS company has evolved. And it is also one that carries with it an important legacy from American television that dates back to the early beginnings of serialized drama – one that engages with the social and the political in ways that signal its antecedents both formally and thematically.

Brad Falchuk and Ryan Murphy – the co-creators and showrunners of American Horror Story (AHS) since its inception in 2011 on the FX cable network – have been pioneering and prolific figures in the production of ‘Quality Television.’ From medical drama Nip/Tuck (2003–10) to the high school drama Glee (2009–15), Falchuk and Murphy have become key figures in the landscape of American television production. Some themes and settings recur in their work: the high school melodrama of Glee is echoed in the satirical world of high school politics in The Politician (2019–20). Heightened glamour and characterdriven melodrama can be found in Pose (2018–21), about the 1980–90s drag scene in New York City, similar to the qualities that imbued Feud (2017) and its vivid exploration of the camp folklore surrounding Bette Davis and Joan Crawford during the filming of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (Robert Aldrich 1962). This fascination with the myths, intrigue and glamour of a long-gone Hollywood is also evident in the aptly titled Hollywood (2020), an idealised reimagining – an ‘alternate history’ – that reclaims ‘real’ figures such as Rock Hudson and others and strives to liberate them from the systemic homophobia and racism of the era. Hollywood had a divided reception – some critics taking exception to what they saw as its naïve alt-historicization – but the work unmistakably reveals numerous tropes that pervade the Falchuk and Murphy universe, such as their recurrent use of favourite actors and their trademark displays of sexuality, sexual politics and sexiness.

Feud and Hollywood's animation of genuine characters from history is most profoundly developed in the American Crime Story (2016 onwards) series strand, which has dramatized, true stories such as the O. J. Simpson trial, the murder of Gianni Versace, the Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky scandal and the rise and fall of the Studio 54 club in the 1970s. When it comes to horror – and it must be said that some of the scenes and narratives in American Crime Story can be as horrifying as anything in AHS – series such as Scream Queens (2015–16) stand as deliriously comedic counterpoints to AHS. In many respects, Scream Queens can be seen as being positioned in the territory between Glee, The Politician, Pose and AHS: a profound satire of youth culture, school/college life and its brutal prejudices, vendettas and hierarchies.