3 out of 5

Created by: Corinne Brinkerhoff

covers season 1

We’re aware – and I’ve mused previously – that we’re in an interesting, and likely fortunate, era of television.  On some level media is media and whether it’s big screen, pay-per-view, cable, DTV or television, people are just out to get our eyeballs and the content providers are sniffing at our wallets, and TV, having long existed as the casual viewing source (i.e. something to flip on after work) had a matching level of quality: There were good shows, but they were rarely designed without the intent of being digestible, and to encourage you to tune in again.  The evolution of the medium is a longer story than I should attempt, but some high-level takeaways are apparent: Cable television proved the “serious” serial- filmic quality, with big stars, big production, and complex storylines that benefitted from the space of a full season or seasons – and at some point in the last decade, non-premium cable (e.g. AMC and the like) figured out how to do the same.  As streaming content widened the scope on viewing patterns and affordable services, more people started following that model.  Everyone wanted an original drama or comedy that was a step beyond the ‘something-of-the-week’ format TV had long trumpeted.  The last holdout on this adaptation were your basic stations – ABC, CBS, etc.  Expectations of quality increased for those stations along with every other stations’, but basic cable was/is still the source for the kind of popcorn shows that have defined the tv experience for years.  …Which is still a valid entertainment format, and so I’m happy it still exists.  But eyeballs is eyeballs, and wallets is wallets, so it was only a matter of time before regular ol’ TV got in on the serious serial game as well.  Not that mini-series are anything new, but it’s the pitch that changes: This isn’t an “event” but a show, albeit one with a focused plot that extends over the course of a given season.  Expressions of this have still been rare – Hostages, and The Family come to mind – and they generally drop some second-season possibilities in just in case – but I suspect they will become more common.  And I think, with American Gothic, we have the first “good” example of this format, in as much as the series fully embraced its non-cable station identity but didn’t succumb to some of the excess that marked previous iterations of the style.  In other, less drawn-out words: It’s a good story, well-told and paced, with the kind of red herring bait we popcorn tv viewers love/hate and an embracing of the gothic tone it was surely aiming for which ended up keeping the dramatics fun.

AG focuses on the Hawthorne family – father Mitch (Jamey Sheridan) and mother Madeline (Virginia Madsen), daughters Alison (Juliet Rylance) and Tessa (Megan Ketch), and son Cam (Justin Chatwin) – just prior to Alison’s mayoral campaign.  Which hits a roadblock when Dad passes away, and evidence emerges that he might’ve been the ‘Silver Bells Killer,’ an uncaught serial killer from over a decade ago.  The effects of this discovery ripple out to the family, unsettling Alison’s political moves and exposing her business-y type relationship with husband Tom (Dylan Bruce); calling absent son Garrett (Antony Starr) in from the wild, who’d not spoken with the family in years; disrupting Cam’s drug rehabilitation, which draws attention to his potentially mentally disturbed son Jack (Gabriel Bateman) and addiction-enabler wife Sophie (Stephanie Leonidas); and also causing rifts in Tessa’s marriage to Brady (Elliot Knight), as he’s a copper investigating the SBK case.  Whew!  A mess!  Subplots galore!  Reeks of TV, don’t it?  But that’s where AG actually turns it around.  By remaining mindful of its single-season-ness, it uses all of these angles to clutter up its central mystery – because of course the SBK killer is actually still out there, and the Hawthorne family has secrets yet to reveal – and allows us to explore the characters as part of that mystery instead of as exclusive plot-threads.  This doesn’t mean the obvious misdirection isn’t still cheesy or obvious, but it’s all about the presentation, and Gothic seems constantly aware of itself, course-correcting with new clues and connections before it goes too far astray.

The actors play into this as well, dialing up eyebrow-raising looks or character-type cliches, but because the actors – all-around – seem to also “get” what they’re doing, it works.  In a way, this is what TV was made for: Back-row visible dramatics.  It just turns out it works especially well when you’re not actively trying to earn 22 more episodes.

Madsen is notably fun as the damn-you-with-a-stare matriarch, and Antony Starr shows off his soap-opera trained abilities by successfully transitioning his Banshee-esque brooding character into something more sympathetic as the episodes tick by.  But it’s the writers who deserve special notice fie actually making this a traditional mystery – I never felt cheated by what we’re shown / not shown, and I think they did actually provide clues to the solution along the way – and for also smoothly working in some aspects which prove this to be a more modern age of media: Alison’s relationship back-and-forths really aren’t judged by the show, and Cam’s drug addiction is lacking both the sensationalizing and moralizing tv would normally add to it.

Now, that’s a lot of good things to say about a three-star show, so I’ll wrap back around to underline that American Gothic still abides by a lot of traditional TV standards and so isn’t necessarily affecting so much as entertaining.  But I think that was its aim, and so though I (in my own tradition) took nine million words to say so: This is a solid three star show, one which deserves an extra asterisk (i.e. this review) that clarifies that that rating comes without any reservations.  I hope this model proves possible so we can get more along these lines, and then who knows – maybe those traditional standards will shift and we can asteriskly rate things at four stars.  THE FUTURE IS CRAZY.