‘American Horror Story: Roanoke’ finale: Where does the season stack up so far?
Tonight marks the end of the road for “American Horror Story: Roanoke,” and we’re hopefully going to see a finale that makes a lot of sense of what’s been a crazy, violent, but very entertaining season for the show. In many ways, this is the season that’s roped us back into a franchise we were ready to jump ship on after the largely-dreadful “Hotel” last year. It was overly complicated, silly more than scary, and cluttered with way too many characters than were needed for twelve episodes.
This year, we’ve seen an exercise in restraint, in bringing back horror to the franchise, and featuring actors only when they need to be there. Luckily, people like Evan Peters and Wes Bentley were happy to give their all to the show, even if their roles this time around were significantly smaller than what they had before. There were some great performances, in particular from Angela Bassett and Kathy Bates, and we didn’t necessarily see it coming that Lee of all people would be one of the last people standing at the end of the show.
Before we dive into the finale later, we figured that it’d be rather fun to lay out where we think this show is going to be in relation to all of the other seasons. With that, we present our (tentative) season rankings! We don’t necessarily see this season moving up, but it could slide if for whatever reason the final episode turns out to be a horror-show in its own right.
1. Murder House – The original, the scariest, the most emotional … the best. Also, the best overall performances across the board. It’s hard to defeat the inventiveness here. Smaller casts have proven to work better in this universe.
2. Asylum – Really excellent setting, fantastic characters (Pepper!), and some genuinely terrifying moments leading up to a fairly satisfying finale — even if it was very different than the rest of the show. Let’s forget that the part with the aliens ever happened.
3. Roanoke – For now, we put it here thanks to an inventive concept, a focus on the cast more than trying to out-do previous seasons, and a focus on brevity over bloating everything out to the point where it’s barely a show anymore.
4. Coven – A really strong opening act (minus the death by lady parts nonsense) and an excellent ending diminished greatly by a meandering middle portion featuring all sorts of characters / stories that came out of nowhere.
5. Freak Show – The sister season to Coven. It lost much of the narrative after the death of Twisty, even if Dandy Mott remains one of the most tremendous villains from the franchise’s history.
6. Hotel – The worst by far. A reasonably good premiere hampered by a number of overly-long, overly-complicated episodes featuring characters we cared nothing about. Mr. March may single-handedly be the most annoying character in the entire franchise.
What’s your favorite season of “American Horror Story”? Vote in the attached poll, and head over here to watch a video preview for tonight’s finale without further delay. (Photo: FX.)