Camp Twisted Razzle Dazzle

What’s better than a good old fashioned American horror story? If you’re me, just about everything. Horror isn’t a genre I dabble in all too often, I don’t want to spend ninety odd minutes watching unpleasant things in a wilful attempt to be scared, it’s irrational. I live by myself, I’m scared enough as it is, it only takes the fridge to spontaneously come to life at 1am to get me going.

Despite this I still felt compelled to watch American Horror Story which seems to have garnered quite a reputation for itself judging by the internet and my twitter feed. Hey, I could like it, I didn’t think I’d like guacamole and I did. So with this newfound optimism I set out to watch the pilot episode of American Horror Story.

The first thing that became apparent about American Horror Story was that it was created by the folks who gave us Glee, which should have been enough to turn it off there and then, but persevered I did. It doesn’t take long to realise that you’re basically watching The Amityville Horror in a serial format, it’s a haunted house where weird stuff happens and some idiots move in because they’re idiots.

Idiots are a hallmark of the horror genre but this is a series, we’re going to have to live with these dickheads for a long time, at least make one of them likeable. I think they want us to like the daughter what with her “brash and quirky” dialogue but I can’t like any girl who wears a trilby. The husband cheated on his wife and instead of getting a divorce they move into a creepy looking house where she spends all of her time hating him. We know he’s a bad guy for cheating and that she’s even more of a dick for staying with him and stating that she doesn’t let her family drink out of plastic bottles.

It feels as if the idiocy of this protagonist family is quite tongue in cheek and they’re supposed to be dicks but it could also be that they’re just accidentally that way, it’s impossible to tell. As a drama American Horror Story is boring, the family are going through some incredibly mundane problems and are incredibly mundane themselves, so the show is reliant on the horror side of things to be interesting.

The house does indeed look very creepy which only further amplifies the family’s stupidity because who would move into that house, let alone let the defining factor be the knowledge that the last owners were murdered? But hey, that’s horror for you. There are many moments intent on frightening you throughout this pilot episode but it feels somewhat like a ghost train, plenty of frights but without any narrative or context, and by the end of the credits I was still not sure what the show was about.

Having been made by the creators of Glee there are inevitably a few parallels between the two shows. American Horror Story could be considered as the anti-Glee - for every sparkly smile and song in Glee there’s a weird and ghastly fright in American Horror Story - if it wasn’t so much like Glee. The biggest flaw of Glee is its insistence on cramming as many musical numbers as possible without any regard for context and the same can be said for American Horror Story’s “weird bits“. There’s no reason for finding a gimp suit in the house just as there’s no reason to break out into song every five minutes.

American Horror Story might be saturated with mystery and weirdness but it comes in such regular and expected beats that it’s rarely shocking or exciting. It’s greatly disjointed and incongruous while its characters are tedious and two dimensional. It’s unclear whether American Horror Story is supposed to be a parody on the horror genre or just camp twisted razzle dazzle. For a true American horror story you’re better off watching the Kardashians.

Gay for Glee

Since Disney graced us with High School Musical along with it’s two sequels, the world has gone song and dance crazy. Talent shows have also boomed in the last few years, and this has given the entire human population the opinion that singing and dancing is the most important thing in life, more important than breathing it seems.

While performing may give some people hope of a better life, and that’s great, there is too much emphasis on the significance of it all, and it’s blurring the lines of reality. The latest craze is hit television teen dramedy Glee. On first glance this is the most annoying thing in existence since High School Musical. It’s essentially the same thing. High School students are taught that singing and dancing is more valuable than any other skill you might learn at school, and that any problems or troubles you might encounter can be solved through song and dance.

If you don’t watch Glee, you will have heard of it, probably through Channel 4’s relentless advertising, where they have dubbed E4 as Glee4, and you will have seen that there have been roughly 32 soundtracks already released, despite only being in its first season. All this exposure is too much to take, and though you haven’t seen it you hate it with a passion.

I did manage to watch the pilot, and while it wasn’t bad, it had far too many little niggles to continue watching. We now live in a climate where there are more TV shows than people in the world, and as such you must choose which ones you follow carefully, so Glee didn’t get another chance. However…

Roll on a few months, and I start to experience the aforementioned advertising and endless release of soundtrack after soundtrack. This of course resulted in me hating the show with a zealous commitment I usually only reserve for the Twilight franchise. There is a but in here, as sitting on the shelf at home was a box set of Glee. I left it untouched for a few weeks, but in the end I couldn’t resist, I took the shiny box set down from the shelf, and was ready to scathe.

I should have learned my lesson from Dr Who. I was looking forward to absolutely hating Dr Who, and I loved it. That couldn’t happen with Glee though surely? I’ve already seen the pilot and that was flawed, no, it will be shit and all will be right in the world, well apart from Glee and the notion that Stephanie Meyer is anything other than a fucking awful, terrible, terrible writer (that’s for another time).

I was outraged! I had all the fiery hateful emotions I wanted after watching Glee. Unfortunately these were all directed at myself, because I rather like Glee. They fixed everything that I thought was wrong with the pilot, and made it into an extremely likeable show…once you get it. The thing about Glee is that it doesn’t take itself seriously, but it has the exact look of a show that takes itself seriously. If you were new to the show and dropped in halfway through an episode you would be forgiven for turning feral with rage at its deceiving pretentiousness. Once I got my head around that the pomposity of the show was a joke, I found it very enjoyable, much to my dismay.

Teen dramas like One Tree Hill and Gossip Girl are often very serious and melodramatic, and when you combine this with the frivolous plotlines and “issues“, it sometimes feels very silly. While keeping in the same vain of these shows plot wise, Glee separates itself from the crowd by being light hearted and intentionally silly, and this makes for a more rewarding viewing. Despite what I previously said, it doesn’t show that singing and dancing can solve all your problems, and in fact the members of the Glee club are ostracised and bullied for their involvement.

The characters in Glee are ten times more colourful than in most other dramas, and

they are almost cartoon like in their parodies of stereotypes. The writers are not ashamed to have a cast full of complete morons and that’s what makes the show so fun. The reason why The O.C ultimately failed was that the writers wanted the characters to be cool and hip, and in the end they felt fake and contrived, Marissa being more two dimensional than an 80’s Mario.

It is the “villains” of the show that really shine, Sue Sylvester and Terri Schuester being the most dastardly and narcissistic of the show, and they rile you in a way that is actually funny, rather than just plain annoying. Like any character who becomes popular with an audience however, there is a danger of Sue Sylvester becoming less of a bitch (though she’s more of a bastard than a bitch) and one of the “good guys” as the show progresses.

Most teen dramas these days go through plots faster than you can say “Ryan is a cage fighter!”,

and Glee would do no wrong taking a lesson from The Wire. While obviously two completely different shows, The Wire was nothing less than perfect, especially the way it paced and told its story, and this is why you will hear every person who has seen it say that it’s the best TV show ever (including me). Rather than going the O.C route of going through every conceivable plot before the third episode, Glee would be wise in following The Wire and taking its time to tell a good scripted story.

I am wary of calling any show a favourite before I have seen a substantial amount, and there is a risk the show will devolve into a 40 minute cabaret act void of a script. Only time will tell which route it takes, but for now I am unashamedly gay for Glee.

***Note***


It did turn shit.