Ryan Murphy

Monday

Alexander Larman

Why Taylor Sheridan quit Paramount

There are many showrunners in contemporary Hollywood who are, essentially, all-powerful – Vince Gilligan and Aaron Sorkin have been able to do what they like for a considerable time now, for instance, and I doubt anyone’s giving the White Lotus’s Mike White too many notes, unless they’re blank checks – but there are two men who are primus inter pares when it comes to their relationship with their studios. Ryan Murphy more or less is Mr. Netflix, as can be seen by the streaming service merrily bankrolling everything he writes and/or creates – even something as unpleasant and morally corrupt as the recent Ed Gein show – and Taylor Sheridan and Paramount have been hand in glove for years now. Until, that is, they’re not.

Taylor Sheridan

Tuesday

Mitchell Jackson

Does Joan Crawford deserve her bad reputation?

Bitches get a bad rap. In his new book, Ferocious Ambition, film historian Robert Dance recontextualizes the life, career and artistry of the most notorious bitch of them all, Joan Crawford. Crawford’s early twentieth-century rivals have faded into history (outside of the gayest of gay kids, does any Gen Z-er know the name Norma Shearer?), but Crawford is omnipresent for all the wrong reasons. Ryan Murphy reenacts her feuds on FX’s Feud. Drag queens imitate Crawford running around with an ax. And, every Mother’s Day, bloggers roll out posts and memes about her legacy as the worst mom of all time; the titular Mommie Dearest of Faye Dunaway’s campy, classic, child-abuse shlockfest.

crawford

Wednesday

Ross Anderson

Ryan Murphy goes cruising

American Horror Story’s eleventh season is a tableau of New York’s gay subcultures, thriving in its 1981, pre-AIDS glory. Its characters are male eye candy in jockstraps and stripy socks, daddies in leather straps and twinks out for a laugh. As Kal Penn’s cynical police commissioner summarizes, "That community? They come here for a reason. They come here to get lost, and that's exactly what they do.” The style? A mood board of Mugler costume-fashion, Chrome Hearts leather jackets, Lagerfeld’s filled shoulder pads and Calvin Klein underwear billboards. But its premise is that of an earlier and much more controversial gay masterpiece: Cruising.

american horror story

Friday

Peter Van Buren

Glee gives us a lesson in wokeness

YouTube just sent me down a spiral rewatching old Glee clips. I was never a Glee fan per se, but it was one of a handful of shows I watched when my kids were in Peak Mode, old enough to be interesting as people but not yet old enough to realize I was not interesting. My kids are adults now; did TV help form them? It did. And what we all learned, and especially how we learned it, is a lesson on the failure of 2021 wokeness to achieve change and instead just piss people off. In 2021, Glee strikes me as influential. When it first aired, it was thought of as, at least in a suburban way, edgy. I’m sure eyes all across Brooklyn are rolling but they miss the point. Glee being suburban was the point.

glee