Stream It Or Skip It: ‘American Horror Stories’ Season 3 On FX/Hulu, With More Gory Tales In The Vein Of ‘American Horror Story’

Four new episodes of American Horror Stories, the anthology arm of the American Horror Story franchise, premiere on Hulu as part of their “Huluween” campaign. They all have the signature of everything else in the AHS family; blood, creepiness and a lot of indulgences that remind viewers that they’re watching a Ryan Murphy/Brad Falchuk series. Does the latest set of episodes give viewers enough heebie-jeebies to make those indulgences tolerable?

AMERICAN HORROR STORIES SEASON 3: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A poster for a high school production of Macbeth. During a scene where the witches are surrounding a cauldron, the student actors suddenly get sick as the sip the “potion.” The school’s music director, Mr. Nevins (Jeff Hiller), runs onto the stage in a panic.

The Gist: Three months earlier, a teenage girl, Shelby Brubaker (Emma Halleen), moves into a new house with her father (Seth Gabel). She’s watching videos of a gothic drag queen named Anna Rexhia (Amrou Al-Kadhi), who tells her followers to face their fears. Shelby recently lost her mother, a well-regarded teacher, to cancer, and the move is designed to be a fresh start for both her and her father.

The first days at school are rocky; in Mr. Nevins’ music class, a group of popular kids make fun of her, and she responds by throwing a book at them. Mr. Nevins, who knew Shelby’s mother, knows her pain; he and his wife lost their baby at birth.

As she watches another Anna Rexhia livestream, she notices that after the drag queen signs off, she and another person are the only ones still watching. They chat with each other, and then jump immediately to video. That’s where Shelby sees the disfigured face of a girl who calls herself “Bestie” (Jessica Barden). They immediately bond over their annoyance with their dads, and a friendship forms.

Because Bestie is confined to her house, Shelby tells her that she will do the things she’s always wanted to do. What Bestie does in return is encourage Shelby to be a bit dangerous and face her fears. The prompts start with stealing something from her dad and breaking it, then move on to wearing makeup to school, then things spiral from there, until we get to the incident during Macbeth. Things only get more extreme from there.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? American Horror Stories are essentially more compressed, but just as bloody, versions of American Horror Story seasons.

Our Take: “Bestie,” the first episode of this third season of American Horror Stories, was written by Joe Backen and directed by Max Winkler, but any of this anthology’s stories will have the “house style” of the franchise’s creators, Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk. That means there will be blood, creepiness, and coming-of-age shenanigans. At the very least, the high-school-centric episodes, like “Bestie” will have the last of those things.

The episode, despite some of the unexpected turns involving just who Bestie is, rolls out in a predictable manner once the relationship between Shelby and Bestie is established. It’s only when Shelby starts a relationship with a classmate named River (Allius Barnes) does the episode become a little harder to predict. But that’s when the episode leads to more questions than answers.

Anthology shows like American Horror Stories always struggle to tell a complete story in their 45-60-minute episodes, and we do give Murphy, Falchuk and their writers and directors credit that these stories are more completely written than in other similar anthology series. In fact, as we said before Season 1, the shorter format compresses out a lot of Murphy/Falchuk fluff and indulgences in order to concentrate on story. But details are always left out, details that might explain things like this episode’s ending a bit more. Yes, you expect a twist at the end of each episode, but twists that make little sense are less surprising and more bewilidering.

It’s a shame that this episode had such a twisty-for-twisty’s-sake ending, as we enjoyed the performances of both Halleen and Barden. But, at least in the case of “Bestie,” it feels like the story petered out at least 15 minutes before the actual end of the episode.

Sex and Skin: None in the first episode.

Parting Shot: If we described this shot, we’d give away the ending.

Sleeper Star: We’ll give this to the show’s makeup and visual effects people, who make “Bestie” both creepy but watchable at the same time.

Most Pilot-y Line: We could have given the Sleeper award to Amrou Al-Kadhi, who plays Anna Rexhia, because we wanted to see more of this character. Also, there were a couple of red herrings in the episode, especially revolving around the terrific Jeff Hiller as Mr. Nevins, that could have been thought through a bit better.

Our Call: STREAM IT. American Horror Stories definitely takes care to tell stories that are satisfying and complete despite their relatively short length, but we just wish a few elements of those stories were a little more thoroughly considered.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.