The Ringmaster of American Excess
Ryan Murphy works in a register that most prestige television cannot reach and would not attempt: full-throated, unapologetic spectacle, soaked in camp and grief in equal measure. Since his breakthrough with Nip/Tuck in 2003 he has built one of the most recognizable aesthetic signatures in American TV, a world where the costumes are too much, the cruelty is too real, and the emotion sneaks up on you from behind the glitter. He is preoccupied with outsiders performing for hostile rooms: the gay men and trans women of the 1980s ballroom scene in Pose, the show-choir kids weaponizing pop music in Glee, the true-crime subjects who become myths before they finish dying. His collaborators return again and again, Sarah Paulson and Evan Peters cycling through new horrors each season, because his sets reward actors who are willing to commit completely. To watch Murphy's best work is to feel simultaneously over-stimulated and genuinely moved, which is a harder trick than it looks.
Essential Ryan Murphy
The canon, in rough order of ambition
High Camp, Real Stakes
Shows and films that share Murphy's love of excess as a vehicle for genuine feeling
True Crime as Grand Opera
The real-world horror Murphy turns into myth, and the works that do the same
Start with Pose, not American Horror Story
Murphy's horror work gets the attention but Pose is where everything he has ever cared about coheres into something genuinely great. The ballroom scenes are spectacle in the purest sense; the scenes around the AIDS crisis are among the most emotionally direct television of the past decade. It also features the largest cast of transgender actors in a scripted drama in TV history, which is not just a statistic but the reason the show has the authority it does. Watch it first. The horror will make more sense afterward.
Body Horror and the Theatre of the Self
From Nip/Tuck's surgery tables to AHS's haunted houses, fear lives in flesh and performance
Nip/Tuck predicted everything that came after
Before the anthology format, before the queer ensemble casts, before the prestige-horror era, there was Nip/Tuck: a deeply strange show about vanity and masculinity and the violence involved in remaking oneself. It ran too long and fell apart, but its first two seasons established every Murphy signature: the baroque plotting, the willingness to punish characters the audience loves, the insistence that glamour and cruelty occupy the same room. Everything else grew out of this.
Music as Armour and Release
Glee and Pose built worlds where a song is how you survive; these share that instinct
American Crime Story is the spiritual heir to In Cold Blood
Truman Capote invented the idea of treating a crime as material for literary performance in In Cold Blood. Murphy, working with Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, does the same thing for prestige television: he is not interested in guilt or procedure so much as in what a famous crime reveals about the culture that produced and consumed it. The O.J. season remains the definitive account of that trial as national spectacle.
Murphy is interested in people who are performing survival: they sing, they compete, they confess, they transform their bodies. The performance is not frivolous. It is how they stay alive.CrossBinge
The Politician is the most underrated thing he has made
Dismissed on arrival for being too arch and too weird, The Politician is actually Murphy's sharpest satire: a show about a beautiful hollow boy learning that conviction has to come from somewhere, staged as a glossy farce. Ben Platt, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Judith Light all seem to be in different genres, and the show is fully aware of that. It rewards the viewer who stops waiting for it to apologize for itself.
Ryan Murphy: A Career in Provocations
- 2003Nip/Tuck premieres on FX, establishes his signature Nip/Tuck
- 2009Glee becomes a global phenomenon Glee
- 2011American Horror Story launches the modern horror anthology American Horror Story
- 2016American Crime Story redefines prestige true crime American Crime Story
- 2018Pose brings ballroom culture and the AIDS crisis to prime time POSE
- 2022Dahmer becomes one of Netflix's most-watched series ever Ömer