After Years, Ryan Murphy’s Flagship Show Might Finally Be Worth Watching Again

Television Despite the Odds, AHS 13 Might Actually Be What Fans Deserve Ryan Murphy reunites fan favorites for an inflection point of an American Horror Story season. FX Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. This article contains spoilers for American Horror Story Season 13 (and many of the previous seasons, too). To be a longtime fan of American Horror Story is to live in hope, and regularly witness that hope ripped to bloody shreds by a vicious clown named Ryan Murph—I mean Twisty! The pioneering and divisive anthology series, created by Murphy and Brad Falchuk, has run for a remarkable 12 seasons over 15 years, having begun with multiple bangs in 2011 with the still-shocking Murder House (starring Dylan McDermott and, of all people, Connie Britton) and most recently benzo-stumbling its way through the ghastly (derogatory) Kim Kardashian vehicle Delicate, in 2023–24. What’s been called the show’s “golden age” extended from Murder House through the subsequent seasons Asylum, Coven, Freak Show, and arguably Hotel, which featured the series’ far more successful stunt casting in Lady Gaga’s vampiric Countess. After that, things got uneven, and I think everyone agrees that all the entries since the pandemic-addled Double Feature (2021) have been, frankly, a bummer. I share that little history lesson to contextualize why the new season, dubbed simply American Horror Story: 13 or AHS 13, has been met with such a frenzied mix of excitement and trepidation. Not since 2018’s Apocalypse—which, much like the new showing does, dusted off a bevy of fan-favorite characters for a supernatural faceoff—has an AHS season’s concept seemed so equally full of promise and destined to devolve into a hot, grisly mess. And there’s added pressure this time, since, while 13 is technically not the series finale (despite a long-standing understanding to the contrary), the final, this-time-for-real appearances of stars like Jessica Lange, as well as the confirmed retirement of beloved figures from the show’s extensive lore like the Coven witches, will give many of us still watching permission to rest in peace at long last. Yes, it’s been a difficult, sometimes downright abusive decade-and-a-half relationship for AHS fans; in 13 we deserve not only “service,” but closure. So, with the first three episodes newly out on FX, does it seem like we will get that closure? I’m going to put my heart and other viscera on the line and say: You guys, I think this one actually might be OK. Maybe even good? Before 13’s premiere, I spent too much time revisiting some golden-era episodes, particularly from Coven, just to remind myself what AHS can achieve when the stars and writers room are properly aligned. And what we get in this first 87 minutes, with the fish-eye lenses, cat-growl soundtrack, and zingy Lange one-liners (“I mean, granted, he jerks around like some goddamn inflatable in front of a gas station”), feels like a relieving return to form. The premise of the season, put as succinctly as I can, is that genteel Southern psychopath Constance Langdon (Lange, reprising one of at least four roles from previous seasons) has relocated from L.A.’s Murder House to the Apollyon, a forbidding Beaux Arts apartment building in New York City. There she is nursing (or torturing?) a rotting, wheezing old man who, possessing of a tail, might be a demon, with the help of a freaky Dr. Phibes (John Waters) and doomed ingénue Ben DeSoto (Joey Pollari), a newly hired hospice nurse and recent plane crash survivor who desperately fears and is thus always encountering the number 13. While Ben is having fun cleaning his patient’s urethra with a Q-tip, Constance appears to be busy with some other little project that, what with the black-and-red, pentagram-topped Rauhnacht tree, is giving strong summon-the-devil vibes. Other residents of the building so far include Constance’s daughter Adelaide (Jamie Brewer) and gimp-suited son Tate (Evan Peters), along with Cult leader Kai Anderson (also Peters) and his sister Winter (Billie Lourd). What’s notable about this chummy group is that they are all, if series continuity has been respected, quite dead. Now, if you know anything about AHS, it’s that no one ever need stay dead for long, so this is not totally surprising. As Skyler Gaetano, a horror YouTuber and AHS expert, put it in a wonderfully helpful pair of videos exploring earlier seasons’ relationship to 13, “The nature in which these characters are returning is unclear, considering that their fates all end in death in their original seasons. Most of the returning characters in AHS 13 are that way—suggesting some large supernatural occurrence that is undoing a lot of deaths in this universe … or something.” That or something is not yet clear, but it has been revealed that these are not ghosts of the sort that haunt most AHS locales, but rather flesh-and-blood resurrections. (Veteran viewers will recall that Adelaide famously did not die on the Murder House grounds, meaning that her spirit was never on offer in the first place.) So far as we know, witches are the only beings who can truly raise the dead, but these revivals are on an entirely new scale that, if a news report overheard in the background is to be believed, might include various historical baddies like Benito Mussolini. Right. Speaking of witches, we don’t see much of them in the first three episodes, save for a brief scene down in NOLA in which all the shutters blow open at Miss Robichaux’s Academy for Exceptional Young Ladies, giving Cordelia Goode (Sarah Paulson, also one of many reprises) the opportunity to say, “I’m the fucking Supreme,” and, Paulson surely stifling a groan, “Something wicked this way comes.” What might that something wicked be? Well, AHS 13’s aggressive promotional campaign has given us quite a few clues. It’s pretty clear that Constance’s project is going to be more or less the plot of 13 Ghosts, an underrated 2001 horror flick in which, you guessed it, 13 ghosts are corralled into a magical glass house to activate some kind of machine that will bring about the end of the world or whatever. I’m not exactly sure how this version, which seems like it will center on opening a portal to hell that’s under the Apollyon, will draw in the witches, but we can assume they are against that outcome, given that they already once had to defeat the Antichrist in Apocalypse. Also, the infamous serial killers we first met in Hotel are going to go “witch hunting” at some point (fun!), and Papa Legba (Orlando Jones), gatekeeper of the spirit world, is probably going to be pissed that all these dead people are suddenly taking unscheduled PTO and hop on a call with voodoo queen Marie Laveau (Angela Bassett) to problem-solve. Reading that all back, even I can admit it sounds like a lot. So why don’t I think we’re careening into hot-mess territory yet? For one thing, getting the AHS all-star band back together in Lange, Paulson, Peters, Bassett, Frances Conroy, and others—which, credit where due, is only something Murphy could have accomplished—has given the project a heft that’s been sorely missing in recent years. While I mourn the lack of Lily Rabe and especially Denis O’Hare (who claims he wasn’t even asked back), I feel fairly confident that this talented ensemble can make something enjoyable, even if the script gets dicey. So far, we’re still doing all right on that front. Tonally, it seems that the writers have finally tuned back into the mix of camp and the grotesque that made the golden era so good. Another part of that success was an at times breathtaking penchant for brutality (rewatching Kathy Bates’ Madame LaLaurie horrifically torturing enslaved people at the start of Coven is really something!), but I’m not sure viewers would tolerate much of that in 2026—which is perhaps for the best. I’m hopeful we’ll get a few moments of warmth along the lines of Liz Taylor’s (O’Hare) moving death scene in Hotel—AHS is a horror show first, but it can occasionally have a surprising amount of heart. I realize that, for the unfamiliar, all of the references to past seasons and actors playing multiple roles must be head-spinning. But longtime viewers will know that one of AHS’s great pleasures, especially as it developed in Hotel and the seasons that followed, was the interconnectedness of the stories, from the level of locations and characters down to subtle things like surnames. The universe has elaborated a recognizable aesthetic and sensibility over time; hauntings adhere to “Murder House rules”—until, perhaps, they don’t. The Marvel-like “Avengers assembling” we’ve been promised in 13 may seem absurdly convoluted, but if they can even halfway stick the landing throughout these 13 episodes, I think it will prove to be an ideal way of closing the loop that opened a dozen seasons ago. And hey, if you don’t buy that, maybe take comfort in the fact that AHS 13 is meant to have the shortest total run time of any season. Murphy productions are often criticized for wandering like toddlers away from their plots midway through; let’s hope the lack of space for such digression here will keep the worst of those impulses in check. Could it all still go wrong? Could we fans wind up denied the grand finale that our fealty through so much has earned us? Absolutely. But for now, I’ll just paraphrase the (actually) immortal Madison Montgomery in Emma Roberts’ first appearance of the season: Surprise, bitch—so far, this witch approves. TV Horror Hulu Ryan Murphy