American Horror Story (TV Program)

Subterms

    Latest story

    113 Shares149 Views

    The Comedy, and the Horror, of the Infertility Plot

    by

    Onscreen, assisted reproductive technology is a double-edged device, representing women’s empowerment, or their exploitation.“Scrambled” is a romantic comedy about a woman who falls in love with her decision to freeze her eggs. Nellie, a 34-year-old perma-bridesmaid, is wasted and alone at yet another wedding when she is struck by the fear that her fertility may peak before her romantic situation is resolved.The conventional romantic comedy may culminate in marriage, but “Scrambled” leads Nellie toward a procedure that extends the timeline of her own marriage plot. Nellie (Leah McKendrick, who also writes and directs the film) gets her happy ending from an embryology lab. “You were no accident,” she tells one of her cryogenically preserved eggs. “You were one of the most intentional things that I have ever done.”Reproductive technologies are increasingly assisting in human conception (even as the Alabama Supreme Court has complicated their use), and they have become familiar narrative devices, too. Their meaning is double-edged. “Scrambled,” with its oddball cheer, gives fertility treatments an empowering gloss. But an emerging horror genre sharpens the same technologies into instruments of exploitation, turning clinics into torture chambers and doctors into demons. The deus ex machina of assisted reproduction can be a blessing or a curse, depending on the god who sent the machine.After swigging from the sentimental techno-optimism of “Scrambled,” I chased it with a wave of recent downers: I watched “False Positive,” the 2021 horror movie in which Lucy (Ilana Glazer) is subdued by a creepy fertility clinic; “Dead Ringers,” the 2023 limited series in which Rachel Weisz plays a pair of twin gynecologists; and “American Horror Story: Delicate,” the latest installment of the FX horror anthology series about an actress (Emma Roberts) who attempts to secure a baby and an Oscar with the help of her ambiguously sinister publicist (Kim Kardashian).As I watched these horror stories, I found myself counting their clichés on both hands. In the standard fertility-horror plot, a wealthy white couple will report to a an experimental clinic. Its staff will forgo scrubs for bespoke costumes resembling clerics or Stepford wives. An inscrutable and potentially supernatural ultrasound reading will occur. A woman will struggle to conceive, and this difficulty will be blamed on her careerism. She will be instructed to ingest strange tinctures and coached to mistrust her own mind. Her terror will be dismissed as “pregnancy brain” or “hormones.” Her pain will be denied. Her male partner will collude with a male doctor behind her back. Her female friend will be in on it, too. In the end, her pregnancy will be simulated, sabotaged or terminated without her knowledge or consent.In “American Horror Story: Delicate,” an actress (Emma Roberts, right) attempts to secure a baby and an Oscar with the help of her sinister publicist (Kim Kardashian, left).Eric Liebowitz/FXWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    More stories

    • 163 Shares169 Views

      in Television

      What’s on TV This Week: Lorde on Late Night and ‘American Horror Story’

      by

      The musician Lorde has a residency on CBS’s “Late Late Show With James Corden.” And a new season of “American Horror Story” begins on FX.Between network, cable and streaming, the modern television landscape is a vast one. Here are some of the shows, specials and movies coming to TV this week, Aug. 23-29. Details and times are subject to change.MondayTHE LATE LATE SHOW WITH JAMES CORDEN 12:37 a.m. (Tuesday morning) on CBS. The musician Lorde released a new album, “Solar Power,” Aug. 20. This week, she’ll have a four-night residency on James Corden’s late-night show. Monday night’s broadcast will pair her with the actor Jason Momoa, who will appear as a guest to promote a new Netflix action movie, “Sweet Girl,” which also came out last week.THE HOBBIT: THE DESOLATION OF SMAUG (2013) 5 p.m. on AMC. In November, Disney is slated to debut Peter Jackson’s latest project, “The Beatles: Get Back,” a documentary about the making of the Beatles’s final album. The project was originally intended to be a feature-length movie that would have been released in theaters, but it was recently announced that the film would be expanded into a three-part TV series. That Jackson decided to go long is no surprise: The combined running time of his “Lord of the Rings” trilogy of the early 2000s was over 9 hours, and his follow-up trilogy, “The Hobbit,” clocked in at just under 8 hours. If you’re looking to pass some (or more than some) time on Monday, AMC is showing the whole “Hobbit” trilogy in order, beginning with “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey” (2012) at 1 p.m. and ending with “The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies” (2014) at 8:45 p.m. All three movies follow Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman), the hero of J.R.R. Tolkien’s 1937 children’s novel of the same name, whose adventures here reach a level of maximalism that rivals that of a child’s imagination.TuesdayFIRST REFORMED (2018) 4:15 p.m. on Showtime 2. The screenwriter and director Paul Schrader is set to return to theaters next month with his newest movie, “The Card Counter,” a drama about a troubled gambler. Schrader was last in theaters in 2018, when he released “First Reformed,” a drama about a troubled Protestant minister. That pastor is Rev. Ernst Toller, played by Ethan Hawke, who oversees a small church in upstate New York. His story intersects with that of a young woman named Mary (Amanda Seyfried). The movie touches on issues of faith, money and climate disaster, and is, A.O. Scott wrote in his review for The New York Times, “an epiphany.”WednesdayAMERICAN HORROR STORY: DOUBLE FEATURE 10 p.m. on FX. This long running horror anthology series from the “Glee” creators Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk had a year off in 2020 because of the pandemic, but it will make up for that this year with its new season, “Double Feature,” which will tell two parallel stories. One is about a family that goes on a winter retreat by the sea; the other shows horrific events in drier environs.CMT GIANTS: CHARLEY PRIDE 9 p.m. on CMT. The singer Charley Pride, who broke ground as country music’s first Black superstar, died from complications of Covid-19 in December. He was 86. This 90-minute special will honor Pride’s career and the impact that he had on country music. It brings together performances from other country stars — including Darius Rucker and Reba McEntire — and archival interviews with Pride himself.ThursdayFRENCH EXIT (2020) 9 p.m. on Starz. Michelle Pfeiffer plays an over-the-top New York socialite who was recently widowed in this comedy-drama, adapted from Patrick deWitt’s 2018 novel of the same name. After learning that her once-considerable bank account has dried up, Pfeiffer’s character, Frances, moves to Paris to live at a friend’s cramped apartment with her son, Malcolm (Lucas Hedges). The movie is “hampered by clockwork quirkiness and disaffected dialogue,” Jeannette Catsoulis wrote in her review for The Times. But, she added, “Pfeiffer is flat-out fabulous here, at once chilly and poignant.”FridayAnthony Mackie, center left, and Bryan Cranston, center right, in “All the Way.”Hilary Bronwyn Gayle/HBOALL THE WAY (2016) 4:35 p.m. on HBO. Bryan Cranston won a Tony Award for his performance as President Lyndon B. Johnson in the stage version of the Robert Schenkkan play “All the Way.” This television adaptation, which also includes performances from Bradley Whitford, Anthony Mackie and Frank Langella, hews to the play; it, too, follows Johnson’s first year in office. In his review for The Times, Neil Genzlinger wrote that, while “nothing beats witnessing this kind of larger-than-life portrayal onstage,” Cranston’s performance in the TV adaptation is still powerful. “In his hands,” Genzlinger wrote, “this accidental president comes across as an amazing bundle of contradictions, someone who seems at once too vulgar for the job and just right for it.”SaturdayTHE DIRTY DOZEN (1967) 5:15 p.m. on TCM. When this Robert Aldrich war movie debuted in 1967, The Times’s Bosley Crowther called it a “studied indulgence of sadism that is morbid and disgusting beyond words.” Nevertheless — or, perhaps, accordingly — it was a hit at the box office. The story, based on the novel of the same name by E.M. Nathanson, follows a group of criminals who are given an extraordinarily dangerous mission during World War II, and are promised pardons if they succeed. The ensemble cast includes Charles Bronson, Lee Marvin, Ernest Borgnine and Donald Sutherland.SundayThe World Trade Center, as seen in “9/11: One Day in America.”Carol M. Highsmith/Library of Congress9/11: ONE DAY IN AMERICA 9 P.M. on National Geographic. Leading up to the 20th anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, this six-part, seven-hour documentary series revisits the events of that day and their immediate aftermath. It includes interviews with firefighters, emergency medical workers and others who experienced the wreckage firsthand. More