I didn’t even know this show existed until late last summer,
when my then fourteen year old daughter, E, started talking about the upcoming
season. She had spent the summer Netflix binging on past seasons in her
bedroom, unbeknownst to her father and me, and fools that we are, we figured it
was on television and therefore couldn’t be that bad. Chalk that up to a big
parenting fail.
She was very excited about the season that started this
fall, Freak Show, and decided that it could become our new show to watch together.
Normally, we stick to such classy reality television shows as Here Comes Honey
Boo Boo and Gypsy Sisters, so for me to get hooked on a drama is really out of
character. I am not one to watch regular television programming. It seems like
too much of an investment of my time that could be better spent reading books
from the library or looking for cat videos online. E loved the show, though,
and I love E, and therefore I was willing to give it a go.
Do you know anything about the show? If you watch it,
you see my point about the mind fuck. If you don’t, then here is a brief
explanation. I’m not very worried about spoiling the show for you because if
you aren’t familiar with it yet, chances are pretty good you won’t ever watch
it, and good for you.
Every season has a different disturbing theme and different
characters but mostly the same actors. I started with the current season,
which is the fourth. It’s called Freak Show, and that’s what it is, an old
fashioned side show based in Jupiter, Florida, in the 1950’s. Pin heads,
dwarves, giants, deformities, tattoos, hermaphrodites. If you can think of a sideshow
freak, chances are, it’s in this season. This show has a little something for
everyone. There’s romance, smoking, drinking, and sex, lots of sex, normal sex,
deviant sex, violent sex, sexy violence, violent violence, and murder with some
torture and dismemberment just for a little something extra. The language is foul, and there
is a naked butt at least once an episode. In short, it’s the perfect show to
watch with your teenager. Also, there is an evil clown. His name is Twisty. He is the reason people are scared of clowns.
E and I watch the show in the dark because it makes it scarier
and also we can pretend we aren’t watching the sex scenes together. The sex and
violence are gratuitous and help distract you from the holes in the plot and
weak character development. Every time an episode is over, I feel a little
wrong for having watched it, even more so for having watched it with my child,
my sweet, innocent child. None of it can be healthy.
Some time in the last month or so, she thought it would also
be a good idea to watch an old season to see how amazing the show used to be, as the current season doesn't seem to be up to the standards of past seasons. Honestly,
keeping up that level of quality sex and extreme violence year after year isn’t as easy
as it sounds. We started with the second season, Asylum, which is set in a Catholic
run mental institution in the 1960’s. That season involved some alien
abduction, demonic possession, rape, polygamy, and necrophilia. Oh, and evil
nuns and a Nazi doctor who continued the medical experiments he started in
the concentration camps. This was all in addition to the sex and freaky sex
and violence and murder and naked butts.
We would sometimes watch two or three episodes at a time, in
the dark. This show cannot be healthy, and Netflix binging on it is just not a
good idea.
After we finished that season, we went back to the first
one, Murder House. That season is the one that actually scared me. The other
two that I’ve seen are warped and twisted and horrible and creepy, but that
first season is downright frightening because it has ghosts too. Murder, sex,
rape, latex masks, Columbine style school violence, a girl with Down’s
syndrome, hit and run car accidents, a deformed boy hiding in the attic,
accidental suicide, and death by a fireplace poker shoved up an ass. I couldn’t
stop watching it, not because I liked it, but because I had to. I was almost scared not to. I would watch the show and have nightmares for
a few days.
At this point, season three, Coven, is now on Netflix, and
we are all caught up on season four, which has a brief hiatus until mid-January.
I don’t want to get started on the third season because it’s the holidays, and
it just doesn’t seem right to watch so much deviance during such a joyful time
of year. Plus, I have way too much to do, and generally after an episode, I
have to sit sort of catatonically for a little while until the weird feeling
subsides. Ain’t nobody got time for that.
If you watch American Horror Story, you either have a high tolerance for the
macabre or no soul. I don’t know which applies to my daughter and me, but
everything about that damn show is wrong, just wrong. And the more you watch,
the more you get desensitized to its twistedness, like cutting off an animal
head and sewing it on a baby body is, you know, kind of okay. I still am not
sure if it is worse than Honey Boo Boo or Gypsy Sisters, because those are almost
real people.
If you haven’t started the show yet, I recommend you don’t
unless you need another reason to feel badly about yourself and everyone else.
You can get that same feeling from watching the news, but it has way less sex.
And naked butts.
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