Emmy Spotlight: American Horror Story: Coven

I’m on record as giving effusive praise to the first half of American Horror Story: Asylum, the second season of this bananas television series, and while I never got around to writing up the second half, I loved it even more. The finale was a thing of beauty. Todd VanDerWerff puts it best over at The A.V. Club:

Asylum was about a woman wrongly confined and the woman who confined her, tracing their twin arcs over decades of the country’s history and subjecting both of them to all sorts of traumas that revealed more and more of what they were truly made of, before bringing them to moments of unexpected release.

So it’s mystifying to me that Coven has received general critical praise, and an even more effusive audience reaction. Because this season was kind of a mess, wasn’t it? Like, right now, explain to me what this season of American Horror Story was about in one sentence. The best I can come up with is “coven of witches searches for their next leader.” And, I guess that’s what “Seven Wonders”, the season finale, would have us believe too? But look how much of the season that summary leaves out! There was simply no plot forming the backbone of this story. Lots of stuff happened, but so little of it had any weight that, by the time Fiona was dead in Cordelia’s arms, I felt nothing.

When anything can happen on a show, it can often be liberating. Look again at Asylum, which had just as many crazy tangents as Coven (please be reminded of Murder Santa). But at least all those tangents hovered around the asylum, which often felt like a character in its own right. At least you can still say, “Asylum was about a woman who was wrongfully imprisoned and her decade-long attempt to escape,” and be right. “Coven of witches searches for their next leader” doesn’t come close to describing the arc of this season, to the extent that there even is one.

The most frustrating thing about this season (among many, many frustrating things) are the multiple instances where it seems that the writers have happened upon an interesting thread and will pull it through to the conclusion. Very early on, it seemed that this would be about witches at a boarding school, a kind of Murphy-style skewering of Harry Potter, but that idea was dismissed almost immediately in favor of the centuries-long race war between Kathy Bates’ Madame LaLaurie and Angela Basset’s Marie Laveau. Then Kathy Bates’ character was enslaved by Gabourey Sidibe’s Queenie for a while, and then she sort of just went away in the penultimate episode. And let’s not forget that Cordelia’s witch hunter husband shot up the black coven to the tune of a slave spiritual, in what is easily the season’s most tone-deaf moment.

Then there were witch hunters, who were conspicuously all men, and it seemed that Fiona and Marie would set aside their differences to take on this new threat. Sure, two-thirds of the way in might be a bit late to introduce a gender-based war between witches and the men who persecute them, but at least there is an idea there. At least there is some sort of high concept that suggests a degree of unity to this whole enterprise. But even that is dealt with in one scene, not to be mentioned again. Marie for some reason was stuck in hell forever, and was also nowhere to be found or mentioned in the finale.
It even seemed, for quite a while, that the show would have something interesting to say about body horror. Kyle was a Frankenstein’s monster, Myrtle was burned at the stake, Zoe had a killer vagina, Cordelia ripped her damn eyes out, Fiona was slowly dying of cancer. These pieces are all there, but none of them ever amount to anything. Kyle got better. Myrtle got better, then got burned at the stake again anyway. Cordelia’s eyes grew back. No one seems to remember Zoe’s killer vagina. Nothing is at stake (pardon the pun) in Coven.

It seems silly to criticize this particular television show for feeling directionless and unfocused. After all, this is Ryan Murphy, and we should all know better by now. But Asylum proved, if nothing else, that there is a way to organize the chaos, so that it does still amount to something in the end. Coven toes a line between serious social commentary and ridiculous camp, but it doesn’t spend enough time in either mode to make either mode work. As a result, it ends up a mish-mash not just of plot, but of tone. It’s bad enough that we were never given sufficient reason to care one whit who the next Supreme of the coven was, but having Stevie Nicks show up to sing “Seven Wonders” and wish the candidates good luck was the absurd cherry on a ridiculous sundae of bullshit.

The real shame is that there are moments here that absolutely worked. Lily Rabe’s Misty was often the most interesting character on the show, until the show lost all interest in her and unceremoniously killed her off (even though she had previously resurrected herself). The scene early in the season, where Fiona wanders the hospital and resurrects that baby, was gorgeously shot, and gave us real insight into Fiona’s character and relationship with Cordelia. But then that was put on hold until literally the finale, in favor of rendezvous with the Axe Man and Papa Legba and fucking Patti LuPone. Even the idea of the boarding school, and a rivalry between Madison and Zoe, was interesting as a set-up for the season. But Zoe was barely a character at all on this show, and Madison flitted in and out intermittently, until she also was unceremoniously killed off.
The biggest issue, in the end, is the utter lack of dramatic stakes. Who cares who is killing whom, when people are constantly being brought back from the dead anyway? (And how ridiculous is it that these bitches stood around having a funeral for Nan, when literally every attendee of the funeral had died at least once previously in the season?) Coven tries to set up “who is the Supreme?” as a question worth answering, but the best I can muster up is a half-hearted, “who the hell cares?”

I get why people would like this, or at least want to like parts of this. There are some tremendous performances, despite the material. Angela Basset and Kathy Bates chew up all available scenery, and they are a delight to watch, as is Jessica Lange as always. Frances Conroy is so balls-to-the-wall trippy weird as Myrtle that you can’t help but be mesmerized when she’s on screen, even as she’s shrieking “Balenciaga!” whilst being burned at the stake for the second time. There are a lot of funny one-liners, whether intentionally or otherwise (mostly otherwise). But I can’t really recall a moment of horror, or even something slightly unsettling. And I suppose that at the end of the day, if Murphy and company wanted to go camp, that’s their prerogative. I just wish they had fashioned a coherent story to go along with it.

Verdict: A skippable season of this anthology horror series, American Horror Story: Coven is a mostly incoherent mess of plot without story, forever oscillating back and forth between camp horror, racial politics and feminist body horror, saying nothing interesting about any of them. We’re lucky next season starts anew.

Grade: D