Ryan Murphy has heard the questions about the naming conventions of his various FX series, but he doesn’t see the validity in them.
The TV mogul tells Deadline that he would “strongly disagree” with suggestions that Grotesquerie should have been under the American Horror Story banner, or that Aaron Hernandez’s story would’ve been better suited as a new installment of American Crime Story rather than the first in a new anthology series, American Sports Story.
“Grotesquerie has nothing in common with American Horror Story. It just does not. I think it’s the difference between doing Don’t Look Now and Halloween would could never have fit into that show. It was never considered for that. It’s a much different animal,” he said of the new horror series starring Niecy Nash, which revealed a huge turn in the story that Murphy and FX Chief John Landgraf also discussed with Deadline.
Of American Sports Story, Murphy added that series is “less about the crime, but about toxic masculinity [and] concussion injuries…”
“I think the thing that does overlap is my interest in my tone and my casting and the world building and all that stuff,” he said. “When it came out, and I started to hear about that, because I don’t read anything, I was like, ‘What are you talking about? No, it’s nothing like that.’
Those are just four of the several series Murphy has ongoing at FX currently, which also include American Horror Stories and Feud, as well as those still in the works like American Love Story — the first season of which is set to depict the relationship between John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy — and The Beauty, which in some ways Murphy says is a more modern take on the same themes he previously explored in Nip/Tuck.
But, while all of these series might have some overlapping themes, they each have “a different set of influences” that set them apart in his mind.
For the record, Landgraf agrees. He explained that, to him, American Horror Story is “a straightforward horror structure with very inventive tone and setting and visual language and characters.”
“[Grotesquerie] is not that. You already can see that it’s absolutely not. It’s totally an existential thing. It’s more like Get Out or something that’s filled with misdirection and social commentary, and it’s not an And Then There Were None-type horror,” he continued. “So I can understand, certainly, you sympathize with people who got confused by it, because it’s nominally horror, but it’s really its own, totally different thing. I think it would have done a disservice both American Horror Story and Grotesquerie to put it in there, because it’s not just a subset of American Horror Story. It’s its own, wholly different thing.”
