American Horror Stories: Lake

September 11, 2022 1:05 PM - Season 2, Episode 8

A woman returns to the site of her son's disappearance in search of closure.
posted by kittens for breakfast (2 comments total)

This kinda sucked. As happened several times throughout the course of this series, an ostensibly cool premise -- a haunted underwater town! -- quickly resolved into something less interesting, more boring, and significantly cheaper to film than what we were first led to anticipate. I watched this via the basic Hulu subscription that comes free with my preposterously expensive cell service, and -- while this is surely not the fault of anyone involved in the production of this mediocre telefilm -- the streamer elected to flood it with what felt like nine hours of commercials, which I assure you did not make watching this any better. (One was a Fox News-esque ad for J.D. Vance [I, tragically, live in Ohio] in perhaps the most dramatic room misread I have ever seen vis a vis matching a political commerical to the likely audience of a show.) In any event, if you thought perhaps FX might want to save the best for last, they didn't. Oh, well.

I binged most of this season in a few days, and maybe a season 2 megapost would have been more fitting. If anyone else is actually watching this, I'm sure we can talk about the whole season below; I'm going to refrain from doing that here, just in case people are watching the episodes out of order. (Spoiler alert? You can; there is no narrative tie between any of the episodes I noticed, and I think only "Dollhouse" even references AHS.) My rankings, for what they're worth, as follows:

*Dollhouse: B
*Aura: B-
*Drive: B-
*Milkmaids: B
*Bloody Mary: A
*Facelift: D+
*Necro: A+
*Lake: C

I have no idea if Hulu will keep this going. It is, apparently, not expensive to make. I figured it was DOA after the wretched first season, but obviously the streamer saw potential. On the whole, that bet paid off; there are a couple of clunkers, sure, but I'll be back if it is.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 1:28 PM on September 11, 2022 [1 favorite]

Lake was definitely laughably bad even for AHS. Read like if you gave an AI generator command to write the most basic ghost story possible. Ghost hurt person, oh b/c ghost mad at ancestors for bad thing ancestors have done and descendants benefit from. Good thing there was a comically quick to codeswitch to "evil" Dad to lay down a rant justifying his impending death lol.

Atlanta had a much better scary episode based around a town flooded after racist politics decide to screw over folks for money & hatred.
posted by GoblinHoney at 11:05 AM on September 14, 2022