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American Horror Story (2011)
American Horror Story is ''Good'', but it could have been better, much better.
Firstly, this is an anthology series, which makes it a little bit more difficult in judging it as a "whole" series, since each season is, essentially, a mini-series in its own right.
Overall I find this series to be "good", but this is not showing the picture clearly enough because the seasons do vary, and they vary greatly in my opinion.
Season 1 – Murder House is "Very Good" with 9/10 Season 2 – Asylum is "Exceptionally Good" with 10/10 Season 3 – Coven is "Fine" with 7/10 Season 4 – Freak Show is "Underwhelming" with 6/10 It is worth mentioning that Murder House set the standards quite high while Asylum delivered above and beyond, where it truly was an American Horror Story.
However, without going into much detail about the latter two seasons, I believe where the writers and/or producers have gone slightly wrong, is that they focused more on attaining characters for the actors to play rather than actors for the characters to be played by. This in conjunction with losing a lot, and I mean quite a lot of the "horror" factor and producing less of a cohesive and evolving "story" they created two instalments of an American Horror Story... where only the "American" part was more or less true.
This is not to say that Coven and Freak Show were bad "mini-series", they were both watchable, the former more so than the latter but they were not well produced, despite the potential.
(UPDATE)
Season 5 – Hotel is "Substandard" with 5/10
Unfornatunely, the latest instalment of the AHS, Hotel, did not reclaim the past seasons' former standards, worse still, this season, was even poorer than its previous predecessor, as I personally feel, hence the overall rating from me for AHS will now go to 7/10 as just "okay". While the general "film" aspects such as the filming, audio, editing, production, style etc. remained fine – not the best but certainly not the worst, the rest that comes with making a series seriously lacked almost everything.
The story, which ironically the series boasts in its very title, lacked tremendously; once again it felt incoherent, inconsistent, insipid and this time had even more plot-holes than even a patient viewer, such as myself, can allow to pass. There were so many things wrong with the design of the characters – some of them felt so extremely "forced", as in, it felt like they didn't really fit into the "story" (if you want to call it that) but the producers pushed them in just so that they can get the actor/actress from the past involved, after looking back that's seriously a big issue.
It's actually rather difficult to put into words how bad this season is, and while I can barely understand why it may still appeal to some, it is safe to say that the majority of us will agree that this was not the best of AHS.
I think the people behind this show may be allowing their "success" get into their heads; it seems the fact that AHS is quite popular and the fact that it is an anthology series makes them a little more careless, as if to say
"if we f*** up we can forget this season because it's an anthology and plus we are popular anyway". I hope that's not the case, but it really does come across that way more and more.