Ryan Murphy's second show of the fall season, American Horror Story: Hotel premiered last night on FX. And with its debut he now lords over network and cable with two programs everyone is talking about. (Scream Queens is the other one. Duh.) But switch over to any show that recommends adult supervision or generates lulz by having social outcasts trade rapid-fire witty barbs and you’ll see Murphy’s watermark.
In this age of the great and powerful showrunner, the people behind the camera get almost as much ink as the people in front of it. Rose McIver is great on iZombie, but, man, Rob Thomas—am I right? And the ongoing saga of "Will they?" or "Won’t they?" with Community was as much about the movements of Dan Harmon as it was about the life or death of the show.
But while the Matthew Wieners and Nic Pizzolattos and Vince Gilligans of the world get a lot of attention, they're not changing the small screen wholesale. In the past decade, no one has wielded greater influence on what we watch and how we watch it than Murphy, whose empire of the profane, the campy, and the progressive has shaped the narrative structure of serial programming and the limits to which it can be pushed. Thank the King of Fox Broadcasting for packing your DVR with sexposition-laden dramas, high-profile anthologized series, and impeccably art-directed horror.
In episode six of American Horror Story: Freak Show, a con man offers Jessica Lang’s character Elsa Mars her own TV show. He knows she pines for fame and fans, but Mars is reluctant to accept his entreaties. Real stars, she tells him, appear on nothing less than the silver screen, and Mars admonishes the snake oil salesman by saying, "I will never participate in what I consider to be the death of art. Civilization." The statement is pumped so full of irony you have to laugh. Lange was, after all, the centerpiece of American Horror Story, Murphy's boldest endeavor to date, for four filthy gorgeous seasons.
Since debuting in 2011, no show has more aggressively dared its audience to turn away lest they witness unspeakable acts of human debasement, sexual perversion, and gratuitous violence. In concept, AHS is too much to bear, but when season after season is infused with Murphy's signature sense of dirty fun and powered by incredible ensemble casts, viewers are gradually disarmed as revulsion turns to anticipation of each salacious reveal. This is Murphy's alchemist touch.
But he didn't start testing our constitutions with AHS; that’s just where he got really effective at doing so. Back in 2003, FX was still a fledgling network trying to establish its niche. After launching in 1997, Fox’s cable offshoot mostly aired shows in syndication and a few short-lived comedy series like Bobcat’s Big Ass Show and the Baywatch parody Son of the Beach. To become a serious player in TV, though, the network knew it needed original dramatic content. So in 2002 The Shield was born, an edgy cop show that could compete with HBO’s antiheroes and (at the time) gritty violence. The following year brought Nip/Tuck, Murphy’s sophomore effort after producing Popular for the WB, and the beginning of his relationship with Fox.
Nip/Tuck was a ratings smash, and instead of shying away from its conceit of two doctors running a plastic surgery practice in Miami, Murphy used it as a staging ground for censorship baiting. Bits of people were reconstructed, peeled away, lifted, pulled, and cut off in close-up during the show's six seasons—and not always by the surgeons, because restricting the bloodletting to professionals on a medical drama would be very un-Murphy-like.
This may sound like standard, if gruesome, fare now. The Following, Bates Motel, and Scream are all shows about serial killers, and Hannibal turned violence into high art. The Knick hazes potential viewers with heinous depictions of medical procedures at the dawn of the 20th century, but Murphy started polishing his knives 12 years ago, and over the course of 100 episodes of Nip/Tuck and 51 of AHS he has pushed the boundary of acceptability ever further beyond the conceivable limits of commercially sponsored programming. It's one thing to play Saw in a movie theater where underage patrons can be carded at the door, or even on HBO where the premium pay wall kept advertisers at bay. But Murphy was doing violence bigger and brassier than anyone else way back when, and he was doing it with commercial sponsorship.
And that's not to say anything of the sex.
Oh, yeah! The sex! As if the gift of gore given to us wasn’t enough, Murphy also set new standards for what characters could get away with in flagrante. Julian McMahon, who played the womanizing Dr. Christian Troy on Nip/Tuck, ought to know. Dr. Troy spent the series engaging in morally bankrupt affairs with patients and in emotionally meaningless "relationships" with whoever else crossed his path. (If you need a refresher, search “nip tuck sex scenes” on YouTube. There are supercuts.) Upon wrapping the show in 2010, McMahon told Variety that he credited the show's success to Murphy's "genius" and said, "We had an interesting entertainment show that set bold, new boundaries for the way characters were behaving. It was a groundbreaking moment in cable TV and particularly basic cable TV."
Shows like Sons of Anarchy, Mad Men, the short-lived American version of Skins, and Salem have all followed the lurid path carved out by Murphy, and network programming has gotten bolder as well. Showrunner Shonda Rhimes gives her characters unapologetic sex lives on Scandal and How to Get Away with Murder, and now that Murphy is back on Fox his Scream Queens are by no means chaste. If it's sexposition that you want, Murphy is the one who brought it to your fingertips without having to worry about an HBO or Showtime subscription.
While Nip/Tuck belongs in the hall of fame for putting the N in NSFW, it also touched on the biggest prevailing theme of Murphy’s creative legacy: the struggle of the lonely outcasts. Although the show centered on doctors Troy and McNamara, in nearly every episode the surgeons are confronted with a patient unable to reconcile who they are with who they want to be. They welcome their clients by saying, "Tell me what you don’t like about yourself." And what is American Horror Story if not a celebration of the outcasts (Coven), the unloved (Freak Show), and the misunderstood (Asylum)?
Murphy started building this narrative during his first show, Popular, about a pair of girls existing on opposite ends of the cool spectrum in high school. But he really picked up the cause of the lovable losers for his network phenomenon, Glee. The year before Nip/Tuck went off air, Murphy launched Glee into the world in all its ham-fisted, campy glory. It seemed he had tired of the affairs of straight adult men, and so flung himself into endless adolescent sing-alongs with girls and gays and the usually boring heterosexual dudes who surrounded them. It was a cultural flashpoint, directly giving way to musically powered dramas like Smash, Galavant, and even Empire.
But it wasn't just song and dance shows that sprung out of the soil after Glee. It was the sassy yet earnest treatment of societal cast offs he gave to the kids of Lima, Ohio that has endured even after the show overstayed its welcome. The ultra-quippy sensibilities and absurdist observational humor that defined his characters created an archetype for programs like Awkward, Suburgatory, and Faking It, and it's a style he has refined even further with Scream Queens. To be speaking Teen on TV in 2015 is largely to be speaking Murphy. You could argue that he's one of the strongest guiding hands shaping how millennials communicate. We won't disagree.
Before American Horror Story came along, the most popular anthology series were horror shows that produced weekly standalone episodes. The Twilight Zone, Tales From the Crypt, The Outer Limits, and even Nickelodeon’s Are You Afraid of the Dark? supplied one-off doses of genre fare to scary movie fans, because the trouble with freaking people out is that it’s hard to sustain. The mysteries and violence and suspense of horror tales become tedious over time. You have to keep revitalizing a story with new cast members and new locations to keep people interested, and that’s exactly what Murphy did.
If AHS: Murder House (its first season) had tried to stretch itself out beyond its 12-episode run, the whole thing would have fallen apart. "Enough with the Rubber Man!" we'd be shouting at the TV. But the concept for the show—take an isolated community of troubled people and exploit their fears—was a perfect distillation of horror, and too good to walk away from in the hands of a fearless/reckless mad man like Murphy. So for four seasons the show has built on itself and pushed the boundary ever further beyond decency. It keeps the momentum strong, the audiences curious and the content fresh.
Scream Queens will carry on the anthology format Murphy pioneered with AHS, and it’s starting to pop up everywhere from True Detective to Fargo to forthcoming series like The Girlfriend Experience and Wicked City. Whether these experiments can sustain themselves on par with Murphy’s endeavors remains to be seen, but those that catch on will owe a hat tip to Fox's dark prince.
To be clear, we mean no disrespect to Murphy’s fellow trailblazers. Mega showrunners like Rhimes and Jenji Kohan have done tremendous work bringing women and people of color into the spotlight like never before. Upon winning her Emmy for How to Get Away with Murder, Viola Davis thanked Rhimes and the show’s writers for redefining what it means "to be beautiful, to be sexy, to be a leading woman—to be black." This is great and important work, but as far as being innovators in the way we watch commercial-powered programming, no other runner can touch Murphy’s influence. Kohan works with premium outlets like Showtime and Netflix where cultural disruption is part of getting a show green-lit, and while the characters inhabiting ShondaLand are powerful women, the narratives themselves are classically accessible television.
So next time you're watching a graphic sex scene or a sassy teen on your favorite show breaks into song ... or gets dismembered and repurposed into a human string instrument (we’ll miss you, Hannibal!), remember to thank Ryan Murphy. He's probably crafting the next way offend advertisers and bring us good TV.
