Do We Need the Fake TV Show on American Horror Story?
Chapter One felt like a red herring all the way through: why hide this season's subject and setting in the marketing if the revealed story's just going to be about a city couple on a paranormal TV show telling the audience about how their fresh start in a creepy country house turned ghostly?
Whether a set of bizarre children or a messed-up doll or bugs show up remains to be seen, but we at least know that Matt (Andre Holland) and Shelby (Lily Rabe) are a married couple who at one point miscarried following an act of senseless city violence, then experienced various hauntings while trying to make the aforementioned fresh start in a creepy country Roanoke home.
Like, remember when Wes Bentley's character from Hotel was a straight-laced cop toward the beginning, and then by the end he was a complicated serial killer? I feel like My Roanoke Nightmare is only here to build a false sense of security.
[...] before the hour could get too "normal" in terms of being a fairly low-key premise, Matt's sister Lee (played by Angela Bassett in the reenactment and Adina Porter in real life) came pre-packaged with a pretty cool backstory and a healthy attitude to counteract Shelby's flaky L.A. persona.
By presenting this current adventure as a ghost story told through the safety of hokey narration, the show is teasing the eventual collapse of these two separate worlds into one.
By the time Shelby tore off onto the road leaving her husband and sister-in-law in the lurch, then crashed into a true ghoul from another time (Kathy Bates), then scrambled into a misty forest full of colonialists and a scalped man and Wes Bentley, the paranormal element had overshadowed the structured environment of the fake TV show enough to become the realer world.
Mark my words, if this fake TV show device keeps up (and the promo suggests as much), there will come a moment where the terror reaches through the camera and finds its way back to Shelby an