Have you ever had one of those dreams where you spend eight hours trying to find your way back home, circumventing what feels like endless obstacles and distractions to get there? In your dream rationale, your mission is clear, but suddenly your feet stop working, or your car doesn't have a steering wheel. Or, if you eventually do make it "home," it's a warped version of it and you can't get in anyway because you can't find your keys. That's what "American Horror Story: NYC" feels like so far, and I haven't yet determined if that's a good or bad thing.
"AHS" creators Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk knew that they were on to something when viewers reacted as favorably as they did to the show's first season, "Murder House," back in 2011, and they've remained rather formulaic in the seasons that followed in an effort to hold on to their loyal fans by not fiddling around too much with something that clearly works. This is a simple and yet effective method that showrunners, more often times than not, can't help themselves but to go against and then later regret. Good examples of this would be "Twin Peaks," which pulled viewers in with a dark mystery and then solved that mystery too soon; or "True Detective," which gave us one of the best first seasons of a show ever and then followed it up with two additional stand-alone seasons that had no hope of ever being as good as the first.
