American Horror Story

The third season demonstrates once again that great TV doesn’t have to be self-serious.

Over American Horror Story’s two invigorating, gruesome seasons, creators Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk have indicated that there is no subject too distasteful for them to tackle. In last year’s installment of the anthology series, American Horror Story: Asylum, the pair took on insanity, nuns, aliens, possession, medical experimentation, religious hypocrisy, homosexual aversion therapy, serial killers, the devil, and abortion. For good measure, they threw in the Holocaust in a bravura two-episode stand featuring an inmate who believed she was Anne Frank. But even this past boldness does not quite prepare one for the opening segment of the new season, titled American Horror Story: Coven. Forget the serpents in the show’s promotional materials; Coven begins with America’s preeminent horror story: slavery.