anthology horror series that has brought offbeat, campy slices of genre fare to the small screen throughout its nine existing seasons. American Horror Story has been green-lit through season 13, with American Horror Story season 10 slated for a 2021 release date.
The show features a starry line-up, with recurring stars including Jessica Lange, Misery’s Kathy Bates, Evan Peters, and Sarah Paulson. But American Horror Story is famous for also including some stellar guest stars, with everyone from to White Collar’s Matt Bomer to Home Alone’s Macaulay Culkin to pop star Lady Gaga showing up in various roles. Which makes it all the more disappointing that season 4, 2014’s Freak Show, wasted both suave entertainer Neil Patrick Harris and genre film veteran John Carroll Lynch in their respective roles.
One of the show’s less tightly plotted outings, Freak Show relied heavily on great casting to get by. While it was a fun season, viewers missed out on learning more about interesting minor figures like Michael Chiklis and Kathy Bates’ ing roles as the show dragged out the backstory of Jessica Lange’s morally ambiguous protagonist Elsa Mars. This decision cost the season a lot of screen time for great actors in the process with Bates' role, in particular, being cut short by a sudden (and barely-dramatically anchored) death. But no cast were worse served than former child star Neil Patrick Harris and underrated character actor John Carroll Lynch, both of whom were cleverly cast only to be wasted when they appeared so briefly.
In his short Freak Show role, Lange's Elsa Mars if American Horror Story opted to flesh out his subplot further, but Freak Show offered this screen time to her predictable and gratuitously dark backstory, rendering his character pointless in the process.
John Carroll Lynch’s Twisty the Clown, meanwhile, remains one of the show’s scariest—and also most tragic—villains. But beyond his terrifying debut scene and the moment in the spotlight wherein his character’s backstory is illustrated, the actor simply has too little screen time to take advantage of this chilling creation. Twisty could have been better utilized alongside fellow serial killer Dandy Mott; Twisty could have even killed him off in what would have been a more karmic and cathartic end to one of American Horror Story’s most monstrous human villains.
Instead, Twisty was limited to two scenes and a handful of unexceptional chases; horror star Carroll Lynch got even less of a chance to leave an impression than he did in the likes The Invitation or Gothika. Much like Patrick Harris' part, the excessive focus on Lange's antiheroine meant that American Horror Story ended up wasting one of the show's most popular characters. Twisty proved so iconic that, despite the brevity of his role, American Horror Story eventually had to bring him back for season 7's creepy clown horror, Cult, albeit only in a brief mention.
