Digital Spy presents Remote Patrol - the weekly column from New York-based TV critic Bruce Fretts, taking a look at what's hot right now in US television.
Fretts is a veteran of both Entertainment Weekly and TV Guide Magazine, where he penned the wildly popular 'Cheers & Jeers' column for ten years.
The horror! The horror! Two of TV's top terror franchises, The Walking Dead and American Horror Story, are returning within days of each other. While they'll both no doubt continue to scare up big audiences, only one remains a bloody good show.
As it kicks off its fifth season - and it's already been picked up for a sixth - AMC's The Walking Dead strips the action down to the bone. There's very little time spent fleshing out the characters in the opener. Rick (Andrew Lincoln) and his ragtag band understandably devote the hour to an escape attempt from Terminus, the abandoned railroad yard that's been turned into a cannibalistic cult's compound.
The Terminants' mantra, "You're the butcher or you're the cattle," isn't just a metaphor; they're literally treating human corpses like sides of meat. So I've got no beef with writer Scott Gimple and director Greg Nicotero turning this episode into an almost standalone thriller as our anti-heroes try to bring their captors down.
Of course, it helps that The Walking Dead has populated its ensemble with survivors from quality drama series, like Southland's Michael Cudlitz and The Wire's Chad Coleman and Lawrence Gilliard, Jr (and their former castmate Seth Gilliam will be joining the show soon). Such talented actors can breathe life into scenes that might seem strictly expository in lesser hands.
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My only complaint is that Rick's bloodthirsty son, Carl (Chandler Riggs), is growing up way too fast for the show's condensed timeline. His cowboy-hat size seems to increase with each season. It's Walt-from-Lost syndrome all over again, and we all know he eventually had to be written out of the show. I wouldn't mind if the same fate befell this not-so-little-anymore psycho soon.
If only American Horror Story: Freak Show could write out all of its characters right from the start. Set in 1952 Florida, the latest installment of Ryan Murphy's shlock… er, shock anthology follows a sideshow troupe struggling to survive against the threat of television - and a scary-clown serial killer.
Like Nip/Tuck and Glee, AHS has followed Ryan Murphy's law - it gets worse and more ridiculous with each passing season. Many of the same actors (led by Jessica Lange, doing a Marlene Dietrich accent as the proprietor of Madame Elsa's Cabinet of Curiosity) return, but their characters become less and less believable.
The human oddities include Sarah Paulson as Siamese twins; Evan Peters as Lobster Boy (who finds work as a gigolo, literally giving sexually frustrated women a hand); Kathy Bates as his mom, the bearded lady; Michael Chiklis (a new addition, and a vet of a much better FX drama The Shield) as a strongman; and Angela Bassett as his wife, whose biological deformity prefigures Total Recall's three-breasted hooker.
I know, I know, Total Recall came out almost 25 years ago, but you'll forgive me for being confused by the show's timeline, since Paulson's 'Tattler Twins' croon Fiona Apple's 1997 anthem 'Criminal' nearly a half-decade before the song was written. (Weirdly, Apple also sings the opening theme to Showtime's new drama The Affair.)
Still, period continuity is the least of Freak Show's problems. Murphy overuses the heavy-handed tactic of likening freaks to any kind of social outcasts (which has already been done by Penny Dreadful, not to mention the X-Men movies). "Stop calling us freaks!" Peters shrieks. "We're people, just like everybody else."
The trouble is, nobody on this show seems like a living, breathing human being. In such a melodramatic world, everyone is one-dimensional. The big reveal at the end of the first episode is - SPOILER ALERT! - that Lange's Elsa has two prosthetic lower limbs. That seems like an apt parallel to American Horror Story: Freak Show, since it doesn't have a leg to stand on.
