Why Ryan Murphy’s ‘American Horror Story: Delicate’ Feels Totally Dead Behind the Eyes

Alison Foreman
·5 min read
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“American Horror Story: Delicate” is off to a brutally bland start. We’re already three weeks into the series’ first attempt at a book adaptation for the FX horror show — a mainstay in seasonal television disappointments, now in its twelfth installment — and next to nothing has happened.

Set against contemporary Hollywood via Manhattan (and later the Hamptons), author Danielle Valentine’s “Delicate Condition” could have provided the basis for a decent limited series or possibly a movie. But AHS needed something meatier than a middling “Rosemary’s Baby” redux to keep the anthology’s rapidly diminishing legacy from swirling down the drain like hormone-riddled pee. And yet somehow, Ryan Murphy and co-creator Brad Falchuk have let a series that once had Frances Conroy cannibalizing a still-alive Adina Porter become excruciatingly boring.

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AHS seasons usually start strong and shocking, taking big swings to separate out the true-blue (and I do mean blue) fans from the pearl-clutching pretenders; see the needle demon of “Hotel” or the frat boy bus disaster of “Coven” for details. In a perhaps ill-fated attempt to follow in the steps of last year’s more understated “NYC,” an imperfect but powerful take on the AIDS crisis, “Delicate” showrunner Halley Feiffer is instead banking on viewers sticking around long enough to enjoy a slow-burn psychological thriller about maternity and medical sexism.

Emma Roberts stars as the tortured Oscar contender, Anna Victoria Alcott, recently broken out from an unexpected indie-to-mainstream success story, ironically and somewhat irritatingly titled “The Auteur.” The A-list actress’ awards campaign and fertility treatment collide in a painfully sterile story of a woman trying to have it all; her career and family planning soon spin into what’s ostensibly an eerie tale of unexplained occurrences, witchy women, and spiders.

Week one saw Anna beginning her fertility treatment and campaigning for an Oscar; a set-up episode, which, fair enough can and perhaps should be straightforward. Week two progressed those plots through a miscarriage and introduced a celebrity stalker whodunit, culminating in a bloody vomit debacle for Anna at the Gotham Awards. (If you haven’t seen it, just trust that the scene sounds significantly more entertaining than it actually was.) And week three, the show’s latest, traveled with Anna to a beachside retreat where she wandered around the sand fearing for her safety; found and obsessed over a creepy doll mysteriously left on said beach; and may or may not have encountered some fancily dressed strangers, who may or may not have injected her with an equally mysterious fluid.

Some critics have praised the season’s restraint as a sign of the show maturing. But having read the book, and knowing that even in the superior original telling there isn’t much genre payoff to be had at its end, it’s hard to not feel like this story and this show are a screamingly bad match. What could be a solid Netflix or Max adaptation has been stretched to its absolute limit and contorted into a franchise Hail Mary that feels distinctly wrong for the show — only furthering the argument that the whole anthology should end. (It’s worth noting AHS is already renewed for Season 13; fine.)

You can’t put the “Murder House” gimp back in the bag, so to speak, and turning down the volume on a series that has always championed camp — even in its worst moments and sometimes to its detriment — betrays those still coming back for more of what worked once upon a time. AHS is at some of its all-time lowest weeks for viewership, briefly found itself tangled in strike-related controversies (unsubstantiated though they may be), and it’s buckling under the weight of the eerie sense that Murphy and Falchuk have finally run out of ideas. Roberts isn’t entirely bad. The story isn’t entirely bad. And yet, with a stark medical-gray color palette and only the most basic thoughts on motherhood and women’s pain at play, it’s no wonder Kim Kardashian’s stunt casting is the most interesting aspect of the show. (“Tell the Daniels to suck my clit!” is maybe the best the season is going to get.)

Murphy has never seemed particularly good at writing women, but even with him out of the writers’ room, “Delicate” marks a new low for AHS’s understanding of the emotional complexity that makes truly great horror. Nearly every scene feels hollow: a black hole of unsupported plot and paragraphs of dialogue explaining pregnancy where the anthology’s typically outrageous gags, costumes, and set pieces should be. In the book, Anna is significantly older than the 32-year-old Roberts and her difficulty grappling with ageism in Hollywood and ageism in fertility treatments is more compelling for it. Other decisions to diverge from the original text — restructuring the story and combining some elements (Kardashian’s part is a hybrid of two critical characters in the novel) — make sense. But the stuff that’s remained the same (i.e. the aforementioned sand wandering and the banal Dex, Anna’s husband as played by Matt Czuchry) are murderously mundane when compared with the AHS seasons that came before it. Once more for the people in the back: Where are the scares?

Yes, Season 12 delivers a strong title sequence and boasts yet another of the series’ traditionally sleek ad campaigns. (I’ll say it, the spider pics are cool!) But, outside of its marketing and the usual suspects casting, it doesn’t feel at all like AHS. It’s the first time the series has had the same writer, Feiffer, across all episodes, and while a consistent screenwriting voice and literary source material should make the project more cohesive, they’ve done more harm than good. The looming decision to bisect the season into two parts — five episodes will air this fall with the rest expected at the start of next year — could give Feiffer and the rest of the “Delicate” team an intermission to retool and regroup. But if the curse of the AHS mid-season slump holds true, it seems more likely viewers will abandon the show all the same, further frustrated by its tediously prolonged birth and in desperate want of a real horror story.

American Horror Story: Delicate airs Wednesdays at 10 p.m. ET on FX and streams the next day on Hulu.

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