American Horror Story is an undeniable zeitgeist hit, and – like it or not – its success is good news for the horror genre at large. But showrunner Ryan Murphy might just be letting the ratings numbers get to his head. Drunk with power, in a recent interview with Entertainment Weekly, he said that he and his co-producers are considering making two seasons of the anthology show for 2016:
Next year we might do a fall American Horror Story and a spring. We have to decide.
We’re doing something that we’ve never done before on the show where we’re doing two different groups of writers rooms. Some of our writers will be bouncing around but a whole different group coming in late August. The next thing we’re crafting up is very, very different than this. Not smaller. But just not opulent. More rogue and more dark.
"More rogue and more dark" sounds like exactly what the show needs after the splashy overkill of Freak Show. But inundating the market with two seasons, not allowing audiences a break to drum up interest for another story, seems like it could send American Horror Story to an early grave. Murphy's shows thrive on social media publicity and his long, drawn-out casting announcements that eke out months of speculation and thinkpieces on just how new and exciting the next season is going to be.
We need that time in order to forget the previous season finales, which have notoriously been off-kilter since Asylum – which ended its major storyline three episodes before the end and slowly ran out of air like a balloon at a depressing kid's birthday party. But at the moment this is all (as always) just speculation, so maybe we're just part of yet another brilliant Ryan Murphy hype machine.
Premiering October 7th, American Horror Story: Hotel stars Lady Gaga, Kathy Bates, Finn Wittrock, Matt Bomer, Angela Bassett, Sarah Paulson, Evan Peters, Wes Bentley, Cheyenne Jackson, Max Greenfield, Lily Rabe, Naomi Campbell, Madchen Amick, Darren Criss and Chloe Sevigny.