vulture lists

Every American Horror Story Season, Ranked From Worst to Best

When comparison the seasons of most long-running tv set dramas, it's like comparison apples to apples: You've got the same characters, the aforementioned actors, and the same locales. Even if the stories change, the show more often than not keeps working with the same stuff. But with American Horror Story, the show that launched a k anthology series, comparing seasons is similar comparison apples to a basement total of monsters created by a psychotic doctor in the basement of a murder house.

Permit'south effort anyhow! Each American Horror Story flavour is so vastly different from the others that its positives and negatives really stand out, like a lobster-clawed freak in a conservative Florida town. Even if they're not totally equal, looking at each season this way allows the states to figure out why they worked, why they didn't, and why they (sometimes) went off the rails. Here'due south a consummate ranking of the best, worst, and scariest that AHS creators Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk have to offering.

Finn Wittrock equally Dandy Mott in AHS: Freak Show. Photograph: FX

The funny thing about Freak Show is that it had the all-time first episode of any AHS season: It featured Twisty the Clown (John Carroll Lynch) murdering a pair of picnicking '50s sock-hoppers, then capped off with Elsa Mars (Jessica Lange) doing a anachronistic functioning of the David Bowie archetype "Life on Mars." Only human being, was it all downhill from there. Freak Show gave usa a different villain every week, whether information technology was Twisty; Edward Mordrake (Wes Bentley), a ii-faced man who returns every Halloween to harvest souls; the closeted strongman Dell Toledo (Michael Chiklis); Stanley (Denis O'Hare), the guy who wanted to impale the freaks and put them in a museum; the insane magician Chester Creb (Neil Patrick Harris); or Neat Mott (Finn Wittrock), a sociopathic rich kid who always got his way. In the stop, it was all just besides confusing and annoying to relish. Freak Show was basically a "spin-bicycle trick" that hitting the adult female every time, even though she was never the target.

Lady Gaga every bit Scathach in AHS: Roanoke. Photo: Prashant Gupta/FX

This season gets points for trying, but that's about information technology. The first five episodes of Roanoke were disguised as My Roanoke Nightmare, a cheesy TLC-esque reality show about a couple who barely survived a year in a firm total of spirits and monsters. The show-within-a-show premise let AHS create dramatic reenactments of its various horrors — including two killer nurses, predatory spirits, and the cannibalistic meth dealers who alive side by side door — and the season'south back half blurred the lines fifty-fifty farther by putting the "real" people and the actors who played them dorsum in the house for a reunion special called Return to Roanoke: Three Days in Hell. It was interesting to see how the manufactured horrors of the offset "testify" compared with the real horrors of the 2nd "show," but other than that, both parts of Roanoke dragged for way too long. Want to know why the Roanoke Colony disappeared? It's because they got bored and changed the channel.

Evan Peters as Mr. March in AHS: Hotel. Photo: Prashant Gupta/FX

Similar so many AHS seasons, a whole flick doesn't quite sally when you footstep back to look at Hotel. It gave united states of america a long search for a serial killer (who was plain Wes Bentley's Detective John Lowe), Lady Gaga'southward glam vampire living in the hotel penthouse with her romantic peccadilloes, an addiction monster that anally raped junkies, a reclusive millionaire who killed people for sport, and a heavy-handed critique of people who don't vaccinate their children. This thing was a mess, but it was stylish as hell. Who tin forget baldheaded elevate queen Elizabeth Taylor (Denis O'Hare) as her dress fluttered downwards an art deco hallway, or Gaga and Matt Bomer coated in the blood of the couple they merely killed after sex, or the two models kept alive in neon art installations that drained their blood? Hotel was like a sumptuous music video that never ended. It was all surface and no substance, but man, what a surface.

Cody Fern equally Michael Langdon in AHS: Apocalypse. Photo: FX

The promise of bringing the witches of Coven together with the Antichrist born at the finish of Murder House was irresistible to fans and proved to be a benefaction for the creativity of the bear witness. The tone of Apocalypse rediscovered the fun, bloody camp of Coven, but this time with killer robots, murderous Silicon Valley nerds, and loony Satanists in the mix. The render of AHS favorites like Jessica Lange, Lily Rabe, and Angela Bassett certainly helped too. Apocalypse even went then far to fulfill the promise of its title by actually blowing up the world with dozens of nuclear bombs in the flavor premiere. Just thanks to a deft time-traveling spell, that promise was revoked by the finale. The entire trajectory of the season was sadly reversed as if it never happened, leaving us with another Antichrist and the prospect of doing this silly dance all once more.

Jessica Lange as Fiona Goode in AHS: Coven.

Was Coven good in the same way that The Wire or Mad Men is "good?" No. Was Coven horrendously enjoyable? Um, practice called-for fashion witches shout "Balenciaga!" when they're roasting at the stake? Almost entirely devoid of male characters, this flavour about superpowered witches was a army camp extravaganza. It deserves a high praise just for the wigs and costumes alone, not to mention Angela Bassett's terrific operation as Marie Laveau, a voodoo witch with an ax to grind. The problem with Coven was that every character could be brought back from the dead, so there was piffling to no drama in any boxing, only with all the bitchy quips, catfights, and Kathy Bates's wisecracking severed caput, no one minded all that much.

Sarah Paulson as Ally Mayfair-Richards in AHS: Cult. Photo: FX

When Ryan Irish potato first announced that he would be making an AHS season based on the 2016 presidential election, there were eye rolls galore. Even so, what he delivered was the much-needed political satire. The only AHS season not to delve into the supernatural, Cult was a swell observation well-nigh how anger can change politics and how fright can exist leveraged to gain power. It was, by far, the virtually coherent and concise AHS season in recent memory, which is all the more than remarkable because information technology establish a way to include radical feminist separatist Valerie Solanas, cult leader Charles Manson, and a Michigan lesbian whose descent into madness starts considering she committed the scariest crime of all: voting for Jill Stein. Yes, it took Donald Trump to brandAmerican Horror Storygreat again.

Connie Britton as Vivien Harmon and Dylan McDermott as Dr. Ben Harmon in AHS: Murder Business firm.

When the top-tier cast members of the first season — Kate Mara, Connie Britton, Dylan McDermott — started dropping similar flies, the audience had no idea what to wait. How was AHS going to survive when its stars kept getting killed off? After the finale, when Murphy and Falchuk appear the evidence would be back in a totally different form for season two, information technology blew just nearly everyone's minds. That terminal twist notwithstanding, Murder Firm was a quality flavor that used the haunted house as an allegory to tell the story of a family ripped autonomously past grief and infidelity. The gimp monster, the petty critters that rattled around in the basement, and Dylan McDermott in diverse states of undress are images no ane will soon forget.

Sarah Paulson as Lana Winters in AHS: Asylum. Photo: Michael Yarish/FX

The second flavour of American Horror Story is its pinnacle so far. Asylum tells the story of Lana Winters (Sarah Paulson), a '60s journalist investigating the abuses at a New England insane aviary, who ends up getting committed to the very aviary she is roofing. There she runs afoul of Sister Jude (Jessica Lange), the stern nun who runs the identify; Bloody Face (Zachary Quinto), a serial killer who serves every bit its chief psychiatrist; and Dr. Arden (James Cromwell), a Nazi war criminal who may or may not be Dr. Josef Mengele. Oh, and let'due south non forget almost the aliens that might be visiting the patients. Somehow, all of these crazy plots coalesced to tell a story about how people cast out from society — gays and lesbians, sex-positive women, and people in interracial relationships — can be victimized past the institutions that endeavor to incorporate them. Likewise, Jessica Lange performed "The Name Game," which was genius.

Each American Horror Story Season, Ranked From Worst to All-time