Eye On Emmy: How FX's American Horror Story Pushed The Miniseries Envelope To The Max
Ryan Murphy, who with Brad Falchuk created American Horror Story, has but one directive for any TV Academy members who are iffy about putting the anthology series on Emmy's short list.
Don't. Be. Scared.
Invited to pen an overture to the skeptical voter, "I would just say to not let the word 'horror' throw you," Murphy offers. "Don't let it turn you off of something that I feel is a really emotional journey."
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Dylan McDermott, one of the FX hit's Season 1 leads, echoes that sentiment, saying that while there might be an inclination to dismiss the miniseries' maiden campaign as "just a horror show," "If you look deeper into it, you realize the scripts and the acting and the production value and the very idea of this is special. If you're a voter, you really do have to take it seriously and look under the gloss."
"Yes, it is sort of a horror story," Murphy allows, "but it's almost a feminine horror story. It's emotional, and it reaches its conclusions in a very cool way."
But before we talk conclusions, let's go back to the beginning.
SPINNING A GHOST STORY
Before there was Glee, there was abject horror.
It was almost four years ago — prior to the debut of Murphy's musical dramedy for Fox — when he and Falchuk first batted around the idea for what would eventually be American Horror Story. An amalgamation of spine-tinglers such as Rosemary's Baby and The Shining and envisioned as a deeply dark exploration of infidelity, the envelope-pushing anthology series revolves around Ben (McDermott) and Vivien Harmon (Connie Britton), a husband and wife who, with teen daughter Violet (Taissa Farmiga) in tow, relocate from Boston to Los Angeles. The move represents a way to escape a difficult couple of years during which Vivien had given birth to a stillborn baby, and Ben, a shrink, engaged in an affair with a nubile psychiatry student.
In other words, it's really the stuff of any number of fractured family dramas, until you add in the extremely haunted house into which the Harmons move and the robust roster of restless spirits still residing within its walls — all determined to lure the new owners to grisly fates not unlike their own.
A recipe of copious amounts of Karo syrup, a toothy "infantata" and an 
ominous figure clad in a rubber suit might not whip up traditional Emmy bait. But that wasn't Murphy's plan.
"I never go into anything with that [intent]," he says. "I just thought that what we were doing was unique and original, and I thought that people would really love the concept. Then once we attracted the cast that we did — Connie Britton, Jessica Lange, Dylan McDermott, Frances Conroy ... Pretty much all of our first choices and a very sort of cool group of people — I thought, 'There is something here.' You can always tell if something is fresh if you can attract a certain level of talent."
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For most everyone in the cast, Horror Story marked their first time working with Murphy and Falchuk. And considering what the creators were about to ask them to do in the name of spinning this sometimes-unseemly saga, a frightening amount of trust needed to be earned and bestowed. [CONTINUE TO NEXT PAGE: 'THE PENTAGRAM OF TRUST']
THE PENTAGRAM OF TRUST
"Ryan basically presented it to me by saying, 'This is going to be like nothing you've ever done before,'" says Britton, who came off a five-year run as Friday Night Lights' beloved Tami Taylor. "And not only that, it was actually going to turn what I'd been doing on its ear a bit, going from this wonderful TV marriage to a completely damaged one."
"Everybody who came onto the show had come off something that was very opposite," Murphy notes. McDermott was best known for his work as an estimable legal eagle on The Practice; on Horror Story,
his Ben Harmon crosses many a line (and isn't above entombing a mistress beneath a gazebo). Conroy had followed up her turn as Six Feet Under's emotionally stunted matriarch with light-hearted appearances on How I Met Your Mother; here, she was a housekeeper full of secrets (including a younger, vixenish visage, and the none-too-small fact that she was dead).
"I told everyone, 'Look, this is cable, and I'm interested in doing the opposite of what I've been doing on Glee. I want to push envelopes,'" Murphy relates. "We all just wanted to do something very bold and risk-taking, so it was certainly a leap of faith."
Lange, meanwhile, was a premiere get, an unlikely suspect boasting two Academy Awards, an Emmy Award and four Golden Globes on her mantel. As a steel magnolia with a questionable value set, she immediately immersed herself into the role of Constance, the Harmons' nosy/nasty Southern-fried neighbor.
"When we got Jessica," recalls Murphy, "I felt, 'OK, this clearly sends a message that this is an elevated thing.'"
However, it's not a project without vivid jolts of perversity. McDermott, even eight months after the scene first aired, can't help but chuckle when he recalls one of the pilot's more memorable moments. "Any time you have to masturbate and cry at the same time, you certainly have to have a lot of trust in the creator and the director — and Ryan, you just naturally trust him," the actor notes.
That widespread trust in turn fueled fearless performances. "If you question it all the time, you'll look ridiculous, so you really have to go all in with a show like this," McDermott attests. "And that's why people responded."
CHANGED REACTIONS
Respond people did. It was last summer when a theater-style screening of the pilot for members of the Television Critics Association first got the buzz going. Going in, little was known about the project save for its pedigree, the assembly of on-camera talent and a sliver of plot. (Murphy readily admits, "I didn't really want to tell people where we were going.") Coming out of that first look, many were slack-jawed if not at a loss for words to describe the frenzied first hour.
And while some would remain put off by the intensity of the material and/or perceived indulgences of its auteurs, other opinions would gel over time, as the whole began to outweigh the sum of its parts.
Time magazine, for one, went from pegging American Horror Story as an orgy of "fever-dream melodrama" to touting it as a "compelling turn" on scare fare. Similarly, New York magazine simultaneously deemed the series "defiantly absurd" and a "powerful" "allegory about worst-case scenarios."
"What I think is so brilliant about what Ryan and Brad do is that they have a very distinct vision that is so outside the box. And they have a great talent for bringing that into fruition," Britton says. "Audiences are really drawn to that. They appreciate being challenged by something they've never seen before."
"It's an interesting show for me," Murphy muses, "because the reaction to it where we started versus where we were when [Season 1] ended was very different. I think people really got on board and 'got' what we were trying to do." [CONTINUE TO FINAL PAGE: 'WHAT'S OLD IS BOO! AGAIN']
WHAT'S OLD IS "BOO!" AGAIN
Though Murphy and Falchuk labored to hold their cards close to the vest throughout Season 1, lest they tip their hand as to who survives the Harmons' haunting, their one and only plan 
from American Horror Story's outset was to refresh the cast and reset the setting with every cycle of 13 episodes, thus affording the drama miniseries eligibility.
So whereas in the first go-round, a Los Angeles manse hosted modern-day horror, the second run will be set in the 1960s and at an East Coast asylum for the insane. McDermott, Britton, TV daughter Taissa Farmiga and Conroy are gone, but Lange and other Season 1 costars such as Zachary Quinto, Evan Peters, Sarah Paulson and Lily Rabe will be back — though as different characters. New arrivals Chloe Sevigny (Big Love), James Cromwell (Babe) and singer Adam Levine will round out the revamped ensemble.
"Because we are a miniseries, every season we can tell a containable story, which I think is a really cool idea," Murphy enthuses. "I'm having a lot of fun with that."
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"It's exciting," McDermott says of the seasonal restart, a luxury afforded in large part by Horror Story's home on FX. "For network television in general, the numbers are dwindling, and it's time for a new model — and that's why cable is thriving. People want to have something new, something fresh — and this approach is definitely that."
This story first appeared in the pages of TVLine's print sibling Awards|Line. The specialty Awards|Line editions canvass various facets of the Emmy and motion pictures awards season including deep coverage, analysis and interviews with the leading contenders and industry players.