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In Praise of American Gothic
American Gothic was a short-lived attempt at an HBO style supernatural horror show, with an ensemble cast, pitch dark humor, philosophical depth, religious themes, depraved villains, questionable heroes, kinky sex and a slowly advancing epic plot centered on the battle of good and evil... airing on CBS. In 1995.
Honestly, the shock isn't its cancellation after a 22 episode run, but the fact that it made it that far. American Gothic is amazing, and I fell in love with it very quickly, mainlining it in two weeks. It sits in my top five, right alongside Buffy/Angel, Highlander, Jeremiah and 12 Monkeys and I'll be singing its praises in as vague a fashion as I can in this post (which I was invited to crosspost here), but I'll also directly cover some of the stuff making it a tricky show for me to recommend.
Of those other shows, the one American Gothic has the most in common with is definitely Angel, with which it shares:
*An existentially unwinnable battle against institutionalized evil.
*Heroes who struggle so much with being good guys they throw in the towel and sleep with the enemy.
*Sadly, a demonic pregnancy leaving a lead character in a coma. I wish I was kidding.
Set in the South Carolina town of Trinity, American Gothic centers on sheriff Lucas Buck (Gary Cole), who is adored by a large section of the locals and feared and reviled by the remainder. If you've heard of this show at all, it'll be as the show about "a small town sheriff who is actually Satan." For some reason, everybody glommed on to this explanation for the mystery, despite it being the only theory the show itself disproves. Supernatural material on American Gothic is not explained at all well (understatement), which is part of why I love it.
Lucas is introduced as evil incarnate. His first act is to wipe out the entire family of ten year old Caleb Temple (Lucas Black) in a bid to adopt the boy. It is revealed shortly thereafter that Caleb is his actual son, born of a rape he perpetrated, and supposedly destined to go evil like his father. Opposing Lucas in his effort to corrupt the boy is the ghost of Caleb's sixteen year old half-sister Merlyn (Sarah Paulson); Caleb's grown cousin Gail (Paige Turco), who comes to town to take custody; and a friendly doctor late of Boston, and thus entirely ignorant of the strange goings on in Trinity, Matt Crower (Jake Weber). On Lucas Buck's side? Human nature, free will and genetics-as-demonic-possession. Notice how that last one contradicts each others? Yep, welcome to Trinity.
When I first stumbled over this show and was trying to decide if it was worth purchasing, two fanvids on YouTube helped make up my mind. There's so little context, they don't really give much away, and if your first thought is "this looks awesome" then we're on the same wavelength here.
I'll start with the preliminary criticisms, which all boil down to network interference. This show got the package deal of mistreatment - not only were the episodes shown out of order, insult was added to injury when the DVDs came out and retained the air order, requiring anyone watching to switch out discs frequently while consulting internet lists of the correct sequence.* American Gothic is frequently criticized as incomprehensible, and this is a big factor in how that happened.
However, even viewed properly, there are lots of gaps in the narrative - episodes end on cliffhangers and the next will often time skip over those dramatic moments without explanation. Plots are dropped, scenes are forgotten, characters are inconsistent and lore is contradicted. Religious themes and paranormal occurrences are all over the place and the writers seem entirely uninterested in explaining any of it. Now I love all of that stuff, as it gets my brain working overtime to fill those gaps, but I'm aware that's a glass half full mentality. If you're looking for a complete story, American Gothic will not be giving you one.
What it will give you is an intensely memorable morality tale which fearlessly tackles all the biggest questions it can find as to the nature of good and evil. No story can effectively do this without being as willing to depict goodness as its opposite, and American Gothic (for most of its run) did this beautifully, where something as insignificant as a boy refusing to cheat on a test is portrayed as a powerful victory. Each character in the core group falls somewhere along a gray axis between the rigid purity of Merlyn (a purity which is sometimes merciless) and the absolute evil of Lucas (an evil which often ends by punishing the wicked), and each of them has nuance beyond their ostensible role on that axis. Selena Coombs (Brenda Bakke), the schoolteacher and Lucas Buck's mistress, who is almost as evil as he is but occasionally has second thoughts about it, is introduced as a femme fatale stereotype, but only a few episodes in, it becomes clear how much of that behavior is the result of profound psychological damage and how constantly she rebuffs men who project that role on to her. She's complex, no matter which side of the fence she's on.
Selena, along with Merlyn and Gail, are the only noteworthy women, and it's true they barely ever interact, which is disappointing, but aside from that, they're fascinating. Twin Peaks had a boatload of female characters, and over the course of the show, no matter how much trouble they caused, their machinations were always revealed to be at the behest of this man or that. They had no agency, they were forever being played, double crossed, cheated on and murdered, and once I noticed that pattern, it was freaking everywhere. By contrast, on American Gothic, the only people Lucas finds remotely bothersome are women. Men swear to bring him down all the time, and he runs rings around them, but when it counts, he can't always control Selena. She screws with everyone, Lucas included. She does so in deeply horrifying ways, but she always has agency.
Gail is trickier. She begins as a defiant, investigative woman who is determined to bring Lucas' crimes to light and who has latent psychic powers. Halfway through the show, her role changes in a significant fashion that bothered a lot of viewers. However, it's clear from his behavior that Gail is never really a threat to Lucas, so saddling her with the role of hero antagonist and then being annoyed when she fails to live up to it is unfair. She's fully rounded, with flaws and goals and her own decisions, and (until the final three episodes) she sets boundaries with Lucas and deals with him very much on her terms. She can't be classified merely as victim or accomplice.
Merlyn Temple is the best of the lot, with the most dramatic arc. She's murdered in her first scene - and she comes back as a ghost, an avenging angel, and the only being Lucas is shown to be afraid of, to be unable to buy off. She's a sixteen year old and she's his arch enemy. It's the most awesome thing ever, and the war between them is the show at its absolute peak.
The executives at CBS didn't understand this at all. They thought Lucas Buck's rival had to be a guy, an alpha male challenger, and because of this they meddled with the characters and damaged the fabric of the show (the final third of which is notably more depraved as a result of their mandates, the balance of good and evil gone lopsided). While there's a lot of violence and murder on American Gothic, its structure is more fluid than a lot of its contemporaries and this allows it to avoid a problem I found on Buffy - basically, whatever philosophical questions are raised in an episode of the latter, it will almost always be resolved by a knock down, drag out fight. American Gothic wanders all over the place with pure structural freedom - yes, Lucas is the sheriff, but since he's appallingly corrupt (understatement), very little policework ever happens and so there isn't even a procedural template at work. Thus, American Gothic sets itself up to freely question whether violence could actually hope to defeat Lucas, and if not, then how? And if evil cannot be defeated, how can it be challenged or resisted? If it's systemic, how does one live with integrity while trapped within that system? As a huge fan of the perpetual battle on Angel, there's a lot of similar riches to mine here.
Along with these cerebral reasons to watch, there are... other attractions. Now, I have a type, not gonna lie, so a well-dressed, affably evil, sideburned southern man with infernal overtones is just going to work for me if the actor has appropriate levels of charisma, and Gary Cole has that in spades. There's also Selena, who has a lot of the classic Hollywood style - the noir approach where walking across a room somehow looks like a come on. With the consistent theme of falling prey to temptation, it's easy to understand why the heroes all too often trip and fall with these two wandering around loose. Not that I'm gonna complain about Merlyn or Gail. (I'm pretty sure this show is bad for me.)
Other upsides include the constant dark humor used as a leavening agent (it helps that Gary Cole has exceptional comic timing and an unfailing deadpan delivery) to keep things from getting too bleak all at once. The acting is high quality across the board, with the weight of the show resting on child actor Lucas Black, who does a phenomenal job, and on Cole, who pours on the charm until you beg for mercy and then becomes completely terrifying. While there are some bad special effects, the writers quickly realized it was better to de emphasize that aspect and focus on making the show's scares subtle, rooted in psychology and the unexplained. And the worldbuilding is fascinating, for all that the lore is all over the place. Lucas, Merlyn and Trinity itself are all supernatural mysteries without clear answers, as is the relationship between the various unlucky women in Gail's family tree and Lucas, and what the rules are which govern these interactions. For me, this is catnip.
So why do I find the show somewhat challenging to recommend? Firstly, it rises and falls based on the audience's own response to Lucas. This is the major reason American Gothic is the creepiest show I have ever watched. Lucas is introduced as a monster. There's no doubt about his nature and yet, bit by bit, the show invites you to not so much forget as conveniently overlook this fact; to find Lucas entertaining, charming, and sometimes even in the right; to win you over exactly as he spends his time trying to win Caleb and Gail. Thus the moral questions on the screen slowly become personal, inviting scrutiny of your own soul - provided you actually break down and start to like the bastard. If you don't, you will find the show incredibly frustrating, because he's a one-man, one-town Wolfram & Hart and he does not get defeated. That's the deal.
Underneath the B movie special effects, a much more disturbing psychological horror is ever present. There is a recurring theme throughout of abuse and childhood traumas, creating a very visceral experience - as rapt as I was, American Gothic was often uncomfortable viewing, sometimes bordering on revulsion. I'm admittedly a lightweight at heart, and don't dare go near material like Hannibal or Dexter, so possibly most people wouldn't be bothered, but there are a lot of age inappropriate interactions, backstories of rape and abusive marriages, families as sources of pain and horror, the works. Every main player is revealed to have suffered tremendously, and Lucas is always shown to be aware of this pain, which he then leverages as a tool of control. A lot of the complaints I have seen about characters (especially Gail) behaving inconsistently go away if you read this show as an abuse narrative. While early on it offers a bulwark against this via a sweet chosen family for Caleb, this fragile construct dissolves toward the end, at which point all that's left is everyone's favorite abuser. Two of the final four episodes feature very little Lucas and instead of it being a relief, everyone decides they want him back because the alternative is far worse, and it's impossible to disagree. Like I said, this show is bad for me.
Unlike Buffy, American Gothic has no interest in subverting or mocking horror tropes. When they appear, they are always played straight. This is especially unfortunate when the last three episodes of the show serve a detestable platter of demonic pregnancy and demonic possession of a child. If either of those concepts squick you out, it ends the series on a dismal note compared to the highs that came before. I pretty much hated these episodes and the fact that I am still super fannish about this show is kind of incredible considering. The upside is that the writers knew they were getting cancelled and while they left a lot of characters in the lurch, they did so in an open-ended fashion, quickly ending those awful plotlines and leaving room in every case for hope - and that is the opposite of a horror movie style rugpull. It wasn't quite enough to scrub the bad taste from my mouth, but at least it cleaned the slate going forward.
Again, a show can't be about evil without being about good. "Even the worst nightmare can have a happy ending," Lucas claims, and just because he started the nightmare doesn't make it a lie. American Gothic doesn't really have an ending, but I can't be fannish about a show without being deeply attached to its characters, and as messed up as things can get, American Gothic delivers. I tried to be brief (I didn't even get to mention the integral journey of Deputy Ben (Nick Searcy), Lucas' cowardly accomplice), but suffice to say it was way ahead of its time and I heartily and guiltily recommend it.
*That correct sequence reproduced here, in case I manage to be convincing:
Pilot
A Tree Grows in Trinity
Eye of the Beholder
Damned If You Don't
Dead to the World
Potato Boy
Meet the Beetles
Strong Arm of the Law
To Hell and Back
The Beast Within
Rebirth
Ring of Fire
Resurrector
Inhumanitas
The Plague Sower
Doctor Death Takes a Holiday
Learning to Crawl
Echo of Your Last Goodbye
Strangler
Triangle
The Buck Stops Here
Requiem
Honestly, the shock isn't its cancellation after a 22 episode run, but the fact that it made it that far. American Gothic is amazing, and I fell in love with it very quickly, mainlining it in two weeks. It sits in my top five, right alongside Buffy/Angel, Highlander, Jeremiah and 12 Monkeys and I'll be singing its praises in as vague a fashion as I can in this post (which I was invited to crosspost here), but I'll also directly cover some of the stuff making it a tricky show for me to recommend.
Of those other shows, the one American Gothic has the most in common with is definitely Angel, with which it shares:
*An existentially unwinnable battle against institutionalized evil.
*Heroes who struggle so much with being good guys they throw in the towel and sleep with the enemy.
*Sadly, a demonic pregnancy leaving a lead character in a coma. I wish I was kidding.
Set in the South Carolina town of Trinity, American Gothic centers on sheriff Lucas Buck (Gary Cole), who is adored by a large section of the locals and feared and reviled by the remainder. If you've heard of this show at all, it'll be as the show about "a small town sheriff who is actually Satan." For some reason, everybody glommed on to this explanation for the mystery, despite it being the only theory the show itself disproves. Supernatural material on American Gothic is not explained at all well (understatement), which is part of why I love it.
Lucas is introduced as evil incarnate. His first act is to wipe out the entire family of ten year old Caleb Temple (Lucas Black) in a bid to adopt the boy. It is revealed shortly thereafter that Caleb is his actual son, born of a rape he perpetrated, and supposedly destined to go evil like his father. Opposing Lucas in his effort to corrupt the boy is the ghost of Caleb's sixteen year old half-sister Merlyn (Sarah Paulson); Caleb's grown cousin Gail (Paige Turco), who comes to town to take custody; and a friendly doctor late of Boston, and thus entirely ignorant of the strange goings on in Trinity, Matt Crower (Jake Weber). On Lucas Buck's side? Human nature, free will and genetics-as-demonic-possession. Notice how that last one contradicts each others? Yep, welcome to Trinity.
When I first stumbled over this show and was trying to decide if it was worth purchasing, two fanvids on YouTube helped make up my mind. There's so little context, they don't really give much away, and if your first thought is "this looks awesome" then we're on the same wavelength here.
I'll start with the preliminary criticisms, which all boil down to network interference. This show got the package deal of mistreatment - not only were the episodes shown out of order, insult was added to injury when the DVDs came out and retained the air order, requiring anyone watching to switch out discs frequently while consulting internet lists of the correct sequence.* American Gothic is frequently criticized as incomprehensible, and this is a big factor in how that happened.
However, even viewed properly, there are lots of gaps in the narrative - episodes end on cliffhangers and the next will often time skip over those dramatic moments without explanation. Plots are dropped, scenes are forgotten, characters are inconsistent and lore is contradicted. Religious themes and paranormal occurrences are all over the place and the writers seem entirely uninterested in explaining any of it. Now I love all of that stuff, as it gets my brain working overtime to fill those gaps, but I'm aware that's a glass half full mentality. If you're looking for a complete story, American Gothic will not be giving you one.
What it will give you is an intensely memorable morality tale which fearlessly tackles all the biggest questions it can find as to the nature of good and evil. No story can effectively do this without being as willing to depict goodness as its opposite, and American Gothic (for most of its run) did this beautifully, where something as insignificant as a boy refusing to cheat on a test is portrayed as a powerful victory. Each character in the core group falls somewhere along a gray axis between the rigid purity of Merlyn (a purity which is sometimes merciless) and the absolute evil of Lucas (an evil which often ends by punishing the wicked), and each of them has nuance beyond their ostensible role on that axis. Selena Coombs (Brenda Bakke), the schoolteacher and Lucas Buck's mistress, who is almost as evil as he is but occasionally has second thoughts about it, is introduced as a femme fatale stereotype, but only a few episodes in, it becomes clear how much of that behavior is the result of profound psychological damage and how constantly she rebuffs men who project that role on to her. She's complex, no matter which side of the fence she's on.
Selena, along with Merlyn and Gail, are the only noteworthy women, and it's true they barely ever interact, which is disappointing, but aside from that, they're fascinating. Twin Peaks had a boatload of female characters, and over the course of the show, no matter how much trouble they caused, their machinations were always revealed to be at the behest of this man or that. They had no agency, they were forever being played, double crossed, cheated on and murdered, and once I noticed that pattern, it was freaking everywhere. By contrast, on American Gothic, the only people Lucas finds remotely bothersome are women. Men swear to bring him down all the time, and he runs rings around them, but when it counts, he can't always control Selena. She screws with everyone, Lucas included. She does so in deeply horrifying ways, but she always has agency.
Gail is trickier. She begins as a defiant, investigative woman who is determined to bring Lucas' crimes to light and who has latent psychic powers. Halfway through the show, her role changes in a significant fashion that bothered a lot of viewers. However, it's clear from his behavior that Gail is never really a threat to Lucas, so saddling her with the role of hero antagonist and then being annoyed when she fails to live up to it is unfair. She's fully rounded, with flaws and goals and her own decisions, and (until the final three episodes) she sets boundaries with Lucas and deals with him very much on her terms. She can't be classified merely as victim or accomplice.
Merlyn Temple is the best of the lot, with the most dramatic arc. She's murdered in her first scene - and she comes back as a ghost, an avenging angel, and the only being Lucas is shown to be afraid of, to be unable to buy off. She's a sixteen year old and she's his arch enemy. It's the most awesome thing ever, and the war between them is the show at its absolute peak.
The executives at CBS didn't understand this at all. They thought Lucas Buck's rival had to be a guy, an alpha male challenger, and because of this they meddled with the characters and damaged the fabric of the show (the final third of which is notably more depraved as a result of their mandates, the balance of good and evil gone lopsided). While there's a lot of violence and murder on American Gothic, its structure is more fluid than a lot of its contemporaries and this allows it to avoid a problem I found on Buffy - basically, whatever philosophical questions are raised in an episode of the latter, it will almost always be resolved by a knock down, drag out fight. American Gothic wanders all over the place with pure structural freedom - yes, Lucas is the sheriff, but since he's appallingly corrupt (understatement), very little policework ever happens and so there isn't even a procedural template at work. Thus, American Gothic sets itself up to freely question whether violence could actually hope to defeat Lucas, and if not, then how? And if evil cannot be defeated, how can it be challenged or resisted? If it's systemic, how does one live with integrity while trapped within that system? As a huge fan of the perpetual battle on Angel, there's a lot of similar riches to mine here.
Along with these cerebral reasons to watch, there are... other attractions. Now, I have a type, not gonna lie, so a well-dressed, affably evil, sideburned southern man with infernal overtones is just going to work for me if the actor has appropriate levels of charisma, and Gary Cole has that in spades. There's also Selena, who has a lot of the classic Hollywood style - the noir approach where walking across a room somehow looks like a come on. With the consistent theme of falling prey to temptation, it's easy to understand why the heroes all too often trip and fall with these two wandering around loose. Not that I'm gonna complain about Merlyn or Gail. (I'm pretty sure this show is bad for me.)
Other upsides include the constant dark humor used as a leavening agent (it helps that Gary Cole has exceptional comic timing and an unfailing deadpan delivery) to keep things from getting too bleak all at once. The acting is high quality across the board, with the weight of the show resting on child actor Lucas Black, who does a phenomenal job, and on Cole, who pours on the charm until you beg for mercy and then becomes completely terrifying. While there are some bad special effects, the writers quickly realized it was better to de emphasize that aspect and focus on making the show's scares subtle, rooted in psychology and the unexplained. And the worldbuilding is fascinating, for all that the lore is all over the place. Lucas, Merlyn and Trinity itself are all supernatural mysteries without clear answers, as is the relationship between the various unlucky women in Gail's family tree and Lucas, and what the rules are which govern these interactions. For me, this is catnip.
So why do I find the show somewhat challenging to recommend? Firstly, it rises and falls based on the audience's own response to Lucas. This is the major reason American Gothic is the creepiest show I have ever watched. Lucas is introduced as a monster. There's no doubt about his nature and yet, bit by bit, the show invites you to not so much forget as conveniently overlook this fact; to find Lucas entertaining, charming, and sometimes even in the right; to win you over exactly as he spends his time trying to win Caleb and Gail. Thus the moral questions on the screen slowly become personal, inviting scrutiny of your own soul - provided you actually break down and start to like the bastard. If you don't, you will find the show incredibly frustrating, because he's a one-man, one-town Wolfram & Hart and he does not get defeated. That's the deal.
Underneath the B movie special effects, a much more disturbing psychological horror is ever present. There is a recurring theme throughout of abuse and childhood traumas, creating a very visceral experience - as rapt as I was, American Gothic was often uncomfortable viewing, sometimes bordering on revulsion. I'm admittedly a lightweight at heart, and don't dare go near material like Hannibal or Dexter, so possibly most people wouldn't be bothered, but there are a lot of age inappropriate interactions, backstories of rape and abusive marriages, families as sources of pain and horror, the works. Every main player is revealed to have suffered tremendously, and Lucas is always shown to be aware of this pain, which he then leverages as a tool of control. A lot of the complaints I have seen about characters (especially Gail) behaving inconsistently go away if you read this show as an abuse narrative. While early on it offers a bulwark against this via a sweet chosen family for Caleb, this fragile construct dissolves toward the end, at which point all that's left is everyone's favorite abuser. Two of the final four episodes feature very little Lucas and instead of it being a relief, everyone decides they want him back because the alternative is far worse, and it's impossible to disagree. Like I said, this show is bad for me.
Unlike Buffy, American Gothic has no interest in subverting or mocking horror tropes. When they appear, they are always played straight. This is especially unfortunate when the last three episodes of the show serve a detestable platter of demonic pregnancy and demonic possession of a child. If either of those concepts squick you out, it ends the series on a dismal note compared to the highs that came before. I pretty much hated these episodes and the fact that I am still super fannish about this show is kind of incredible considering. The upside is that the writers knew they were getting cancelled and while they left a lot of characters in the lurch, they did so in an open-ended fashion, quickly ending those awful plotlines and leaving room in every case for hope - and that is the opposite of a horror movie style rugpull. It wasn't quite enough to scrub the bad taste from my mouth, but at least it cleaned the slate going forward.
Again, a show can't be about evil without being about good. "Even the worst nightmare can have a happy ending," Lucas claims, and just because he started the nightmare doesn't make it a lie. American Gothic doesn't really have an ending, but I can't be fannish about a show without being deeply attached to its characters, and as messed up as things can get, American Gothic delivers. I tried to be brief (I didn't even get to mention the integral journey of Deputy Ben (Nick Searcy), Lucas' cowardly accomplice), but suffice to say it was way ahead of its time and I heartily and guiltily recommend it.
*That correct sequence reproduced here, in case I manage to be convincing:
Pilot
A Tree Grows in Trinity
Eye of the Beholder
Damned If You Don't
Dead to the World
Potato Boy
Meet the Beetles
Strong Arm of the Law
To Hell and Back
The Beast Within
Rebirth
Ring of Fire
Resurrector
Inhumanitas
The Plague Sower
Doctor Death Takes a Holiday
Learning to Crawl
Echo of Your Last Goodbye
Strangler
Triangle
The Buck Stops Here
Requiem
no subject
I feel so many similar ways about the tragically cancelled Penny Dreadful!
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no subject
I'd only vaguely heard of Penny Dreadful, but if it compares well with American Gothic, it's definitely a show I'll have to investigate.
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no subject
no subject