Shows That Make You Hide Behind The Couch: The Awesome Rise of Horror TV

I am a horror fan. I've mentioned some of my scary literary faves already, but lately I've been getting most of my shocks on the small screen. When I was growing up, the only horror TV shows I remember were the occasional Stephen King mini-series (Rose Red has given me a yearning to visit the Winchester Mystery House someday), but in the last few years genre television has trickled down from networks like HBO and Showtime onto more standard cable channels like AMC and FX and now even onto network stations. Some of them are amongst my favorite shows on TV right now. Others are... less successful.

The favorites are obvious. In its third season, The Walking Dead has managed to make an extremely gory zombie tale into one of the most interesting dramas on TV.

Image via IMDB

What I've loved about The Walking Dead is how much deeper it's able to go than movies featuring the same post-apocalyptic scenario. You can only go so "post" in the typical movie run time. The show, however, has taken us about a year into the zombie apocalypse. This long view on a group of survivors in a deeply changed world allows the show to really explore what it would be like to try and make it in such a brutal world. How does it change people? Is it still possible to have some concept of family? How long can you make it before you even want to survive any more? The show has had some misses, notably dragging out some story lines in the second season until they became rather stagnant, and patchy character development for some of the cast, but it's grown stronger and stronger as it's gone along and I'm still excited to see where it goes.

Image via FX

My absolute favorite show on TV right now, though, is American Horror Story. AHS recently finished its second season, and news about the third is trickling out. The show's format is ideal for between-season build-up; rather than a continuous plot line with season finale cliffhangers, AHS has structured each season as a stand alone story with different characters and settings. It's the television equivalent of repertory theater, with a group of core actors playing different roles in multiple seasons. Creator Ryan Murphy's muse has arguably been the great Jessica Lange, but Evan Peters, Dylan McDermott, Lily Rabe, Frances Conroy, Zachary Quinto, and Sarah Paulson have all appeared in both seasons, and many of them are already signed on to the third.

Season one was AHS: Murder House, centered around a modern family who move to a historic home with a less than pleasant history. I was hooked from the first episode, though unsure at the time how the show would sustain itself for more than one season. It wasn't revealed until the season one finale that the show had been conceived as an anthology program, which neatly solved that problem. One of the most exciting casting announcements for season three is the return of Taissa Farmiga, who played teenage heroine Violet Harmon and really anchored season one for me.

Season two was a complete departure from season one, jumping back a few decades and taking place in an asylum in Massachusetts. The season was all over the place, and I found it considerably darker than the first, but again I felt the one-season story format served it well. Unlike shows with a potentially indefinite run, the creators knew they had to wrap things up. They put in a lot, but bundled things up pretty well in the end. Not much is known about season three yet, except that it will be very woman centric (something I'm excited about, especially when I already find the show has such compelling female characters) and take place in multiple cities. Along with Lange, Paulson, and Farmiga, Kathy Bates has also joined the cast. I'm thrilled, although I'll just be waiting for her to hobble someone whenever she's on screen.

Image via Wikipedia

Current network offering The Following is more on the mediocre side. The show bridges the horror tropes with crime procedurals like C.S.I. and Criminal Minds that are already popular on network TV. Rather than showcasing the FBI solving a different case every week, however, the show centers on the ongoing investigation into incarcerated serial killer Joe Carroll, who has recruited a cult of Edger Allen Poe obsessed followers to continue his work. The show suffers for me because there are a lot of plot holes, and a lot of unfortunate "don't do that, that's really dumb!" character moments, which seem to plague weaker horror movies as well. The Following also seems to have the same issue that I initially worried about in AHS and that was a huge problem for the AMC crime drama The Killing: you can only drag this premise out so long before it become unsatisfying for the viewer. The Killing gave us two seasons with cops running into dead ends on the same murder case as viewers became more and more annoyed, and The Following is already starting to do the same for me. The FBI can only screw up the investigation so much before I stop wanting to watch them blunder along.

Another recent network offering was Do No Harm, which I had hoped would follow in the footsteps of the fun and freaky BBC mini-series Jekyll, but after one episode it was more Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Fratboy anything else.  I gave up after the first episode and apparently I wasn't alone; the show was quickly canceled.

There are a few interesting things coming up as well. I frequently feel that both The Following and Criminal Minds borrow strongly from Thomas Harris, and since that formula has been working so far someone has gone straight to the source and decided to make a Hannibal television series.The show has a good cast; Mads Mikkelsen plays Hannibal, and having played a Bond villain he has a sufficient creepy/suave ratio to pull off the part. Hugh Dancy plays Will Graham, the FBI agent from the novels (and played by Edward Norton in Red Dragon) who eventually captured Hannibal. The cast seems decent, but again I'm unsure how long a show can keep up this premise. Unless they're going to change things up completely, I already know that Will figures Hannibal out, so how long can this really go on?

Image via aetv.com

Another show mining old territory is Bates Motel. This is actually a mini-series that goes back to Norman Bates' roots. It stars Freddie Highmore as young Norman and Vera Farmiga (sister of AHS's Taissa--how awesome would it be if she signed on for season three too?) as his mother. The previews look a bit salacious but Vera Farmiga is a fantastic actress so I'm definitely giving this one a shot.

And finally, Stephen King's Under the Dome is being made into a 13 episode summer series. I'm unclear on whether this has been picked up as a finite series or with the potential for an additional season, although I hope it's the former as it's another unsustainable situation, at least if they keep some of the more interesting issues faced in the novel. As usual, anything with King's name on it will has me on board.