Niecy Nash in Ryan Murphy's FX horror drama

Branding is central to Ryan Murphy's TV empire, but the brand names themselves often seem a little fungible.

Take Murphy's output in this current two-week period: FX's American Sports History: Aaron Hernandez could definitely have been renamed Hernandez: Monster – The Story of Aaron Hernandez. Netflixs Monsters: The Story of Lyle and Erik Menendez probably could have beende Feud: The Menendez Family. I haven't seen ABC's Doctor Odysseybut every advertisement suggests so 9-1-1: Love Boat.

On this changing scale FX's grotesque could have easily done that American horror story Name appended in front. With hints of cult, Circle And asylum It's immediately noticeable that the signatures of this series are almost a bagel approach.

After just two episodes (neither made available to critics prior to the premiere), it's too early to tell whether that description will prove reductive, even considering how large the episodes are American horror story Franchise has become. While the series has an appropriately bold yet overly familiar start, neither do the titles grotesque still American Horror Story: Grotesque would really capture the best reason to watch it – namely the absolute pleasure of seeing Niecy Nash in the lead role as the undisputed star of what could be her very own branded property in the Murphy Empire. The co-creator has done well against Nash in the past, giving her a well-deserved Emmy win for the Dahmer cause. But this latest venture could turn out to be one of her best roles.

Nash plays Lois Tryon, a tired police officer nearing the end of her successful career in a small town where there is no electricity and it always seems to be raining. Lois, who keeps careful tabulated records of all the heinous crimes she has solved over the years, has a major drinking problem. She also struggles to hold together the last remnants of a family, including daughter Merritt (Raven Goodwin), who is brilliant at puzzles and has absolutely no interest in adapting her eating habits to her health, and her husband Marshall (Courtney B. Vance). , a former philosophy professor, is now in a coma in the hospital.

At the beginning of the story, Lois becomes involved in the horrific quintuple murder of a family who are slaughtered in a ritualized and exotic culinary manner. The case is unlike anything Lois or her colleagues have ever experienced, but it won't last long. Over the next two chapters, Lois must endure at least three more murderous scenes, each more gruesome and religiously specific than the last.

It's the latter element that attracts the attention of Sister Megan (Micaela Diamond), a journalistically inclined nun who believes the murders are a connected part of something borderline apocalyptic that Lois can't begin to comprehend.

Created by Murphy, Jon Robin Baitz and Joe Baken, grotesque plays like the one from CBS/Paramount+ Devilish hits Seven – a dark fin de siècle commentary on a society in disarray, made all the more threatening by the fact that no century is coming to an end. We're just stuck here. Between rampant homelessness, a global pandemic, and a crisis in spiritual faith so bad that even churches are resorting to clickbait journalism to lure people into the pews, the world simply hasn't made sense anymore. This poses serious problems for Lois, who prides herself on her meticulous logic. But it presents an opportunity for Sister Megan, who may not understand what is happening but has the biblical vernacular to speculate.

As stated in the opening parts by Max Winkler, grotesque is a dreary and depressing place where everyone seems to be wading in the same muck. This includes the lewd nurse Redd (Lesley Manville), who lovingly cares for Lois' husband, who is either blatantly perverted or, through Lois' cynical lens, simply appears to be perverted. Even Sister Megan's boss, Father Charlie (Nicholas Alexander Chavez), is as much a man of true crime as a self-flagellating man of God.

“I tell myself that I only look at these things out of concern for the victims and compassion,” confesses Father Charlie. “But the truth is that I have a certain morbid fascination with these crime shows and podcasts.”

In this way, Father Charlie speaks both to the Ryan Murphy TV empire and to audiences who may want to rise above that discomfort but always end up wallowing in it.

All of this could make a difference grotesque sounds like a televised dirge, but it's not. Or at least not always. Sure, Baitz loves a Bible-tinged monologue about the changing nature of good and evil. But to put it another way, you could describe this drama as a pretty crazy and wild buddy cop show in which the crime-fighting partners are an alcoholic detective and a profanity-spewing nun – right down to a nod to Cagney and Co. in the series Lacey.

It's a show in which a nun and a priest sit in a diner, eat hamburgers and discuss their favorite serial killers (Father Charlie is a big fan of Ed Gein, who, not even remotely coincidentally, will be the focus of the next series). Monster season on Netflix). It's so self-consciously dark that the sleaze doesn't necessarily read as parody, but definitely as a fetish or some form of perversity. It's like a version of True detective willing to accept his place as mush rather than prestige.

It's about being depressed – Carolina Costa's cinematography makes the moral miasma concrete, daring us to search desperately for the rays of light or brief bursts of lightness – but yet doesn't feel monotonous, thanks in large part to Nash's attitude, none Doing shit cuts right through. Lois is, by nature, the kind of archetypal hard-boiled, hard-drinking, borderline nihilistic detective traditionally limited to middle-aged white men in genre pieces. Nash makes the trope fresh again, as she couldn't play a flat archetype if she tried.

In just a few minutes, her flashbacks with Vance convey the believability of a decades-long relationship that was devoid of any current affection but is rich in accumulated memories. Her scenes with the excellent Goodwin beautifully balance affection and utter resignation. And watching Nash and Manville argue with nothing but sharp words is such an inherently campy spectacle that it's a wonder we didn't get a whole American horror story season previously dedicated to him. After that we will certainly do it.

In her first longer TV role, Broadway star Diamond immediately achieves a likeable breakthrough. She's reminiscent of other outlandish and crazy religious characters, but she never plays just one form of creepiness. She works particularly well opposite Chavez, who displays his boundless charisma in a much more reserved manner than in his role as Lyle Menendez Monster asked by him. However, once Father Charlie took to masturbating and then mortifying his flesh, he became the kind of debauched man by trade that I've seen too many times to find even remotely shocking.

Unfortunately, there's a lot of that familiarity in the early parts of grotesque. While the title and excerpts from “Barfing Cops” want to suggest something operatic and, well, grotesque that's unfathomable, what we ultimately get here isn't quite that. Although it's certainly more disturbing than your average Serial killer with about 300 episodes Criminal mindsit's less inspired and edgy than the corpse from True Detective: Night Country.

Maybe things will really get distorted when Travis Kelce shows up? There's no point in going to great lengths to cast the soccer star if you don't plan on messing something up with him. For now, however, Nash and Co. offer reasons to stick with it grotesque for at least a few more weeks.