Strings leer as the camera swoops through dead trees, a wind chime made of bones dangles in view, and a pair of identical red headed boys who look like infielders from The Bad News Bears stroll into frame holding baseball bats. The pilot episode of the series - which advertised magnetic leads like Connie Britton, Dylan McDermott, and Jessica Lange - begins with a breakneck cold open. Sometimes, especially on HBO, nothing terribly significant will happen in the space of a single episode in a Ryan Murphy episode, sometimes everything happens all at once.Īnd no Ryan Murphy show has so unapologetically announced its presence in this manner as FX’s American Horror Story, a show which entered the crowded field of serial television like a suicide bomber. Murphy’s characters presumably hate-watch Treme because even they can’t imagine a world in which they would move with so little noise and so much meditation.

Though occasionally tedious, Murphy’s shows are rarely slow, and they never, ever make arguments for themselves. Advocating melodrama over studied observation, inspirational musical numbers and pockets of shriek-inducing violence over meandering narrative, and broad social statements over minute ethnography, Murphy, for his part, is likely the kind of maximalist auteur that would give David Simon heartburn. Last month, in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Jonathan Alexander more charitably described Simon’s epic drama about post-Katrina New Orleans as a “long, slow, sometimes beautiful, sometimes tedious argument for itself.” Murphy, whose numerous hit series include FOX’s Glee and FX’s Nip/Tuck, would appear to ascribe to a different aesthetic philosophy. As was observed by Vulture a few weeks ago, Murphy’s characters on both The New Normal and Glee have recently been throwing barbs at David Simon’s notoriously slow series as one that is either hate-watched or not watched at all.

RYAN MURPHY SEEMS to have something against HBO’s Treme, and it’s not hard to see why.

Jealous Serial Killer by Lena Little