FX Boss On “Fun” ‘American Horror Story: 1984’, More ‘Crime Story’ Beyond ‘Impeachment’ & Status Of ‘Feud’
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American Horror Story: 1984, the latest installment of FX’s horror anthology series, set at a summer camp, is launching next month.
“It’s really fun,” FX Networks chairman John Landgraf told Deadline at TCA.
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Having premiered in 2011, AHS is the longest-running drama series on FX by a mile. But, nine seasons in, it is not showing its age, largely because of executive producer Ryan Murphy’s ability to reinvent the series every season, Landgraf said.
“Every year he comes up with something I’d never seen coming, and I never know what he is going to come up with,” Landgraf said. “Literally, I don’t find out until he calls and says ‘OK, here is what we are going to do for the next cycle.’ And it always surprises me.”
1984 won’t feature Murphy’s AHS muse Sarah Paulson as she currently stars in two other Murphy series, Ratched on Netflix and Impeachment: American Crime Story on FX. The upcoming season of AHS doesn’t have a single lead, Landgraf said.
“Ryan always has been so good deconstructing genres in a really fun way; this sort of deconstructs the classic summer camp horror trope, and therefore it’s really oriented around a group of young adults,” he said.
The news of Impeachment made a lot of headlines this week, both with its subject, the sex scandal that rocked the Bill Clinton presidency, and its timing — airing in the weeks leading to the 2020 Presidential election next fall.
It is the third installment in the ACS franchise, following People vs. O.J. Simpson and Versace, and likely won’t be the last.
“We actually have a lot of stuff in development,” Landgraf said. “It’s such an incredibly high bar to get scripted material in the true crime space that is as good as O.J. or Versace. At any given time, (executive producers) Nina Jacobson, Brad Simpson or Ryan Murphy say, ‘We may have 3,4,5,6 things in development behind it.'”
But FX is not close to greenlighting another installment beyond Impeachment.
“Our point of view is, whenever material comes out of that process that is good enough, we will make another cycle,” Landgraf said. “We might get fortunate and get multiple cycles, we may go 3-4 years and make a cycle every year. On the other hand, we are not going to make a cycle of the show just to make a cycle of the show unless we have strong material.”
As for Murphy’s third FX anthology series franchise, Feud, it’s currently dormant, Landgraf said.
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