Pitches (American Horror Story)

It's no secret that I'm one of the hottest young writers in the game right now. My pilot has been rejected by three (three!) screenplay competitions. One of which offered me the note, "The other characters aren't well defined and the humor could be funnier." So I'm basically on a rocket to the moon.

It's in this capacity that I thought I would offer to help embattled showrunner Ryan Murphy (creator of Nip/Tuck, Glee, and American Horror Story) with some ideas on how to improve the next season of American Horror story. The season that ended just last week was a big pile of awful campy garbage, in a bad way, not in a good way like the tolerable Murphy excretions, so it's clear he needs my guiding hand.

First off, Murphy has expressed his desire for the next season to be a period piece, like season 2's mostly successful American Horror Story: Asylum. It should be noted that this is a season that featured a bunch of aliens that were never explained, Dylan McDermott nursing from a prostitute, and a woman who may or may not have been Anne Frank.

I know Murphy's natural inclination will be to look for eras where he can cast divas to chew scenery for 13 hours worth of episodes - Revolutionary France, Victorian England, the Roaring Twenties - basically any place with costumes, stupid accents, and horrifically tasteless things for Murphy to appropriate as entertainment (the natural terminus of this show is a season that's just set in an abortion clinic). It's here that I'd encourage Murph to go against his first instinct and instead of looking backward for a period onto which to lay his piece, he look forward and produce American Horror Story: SPACE!

I was originally going to actually break 13 episodes worth of story, but that proved daunting and also boring. So here are the broad strokes.

Cast

Sarah Paulson - Dagny Coleman, a sensitive research scientist who lives alone on a space station with her husband, who she isn't sure if she loves.

Lance Reddick - David Palmer, great-great-grandson of the former president, David unrepentantly loves Dagny, but he's unable to open up emotionally because he is still scarred by the troubling legacy of spacism (racism against people who live in space).

Dylan McDermott - Johnny 5, an android who is plagued by existential questions and also an addiction to moon rocks.

Taissa Farmiga - A broom.

Story

Episode One: The Space Between
Dagny and David live aboard the space shuttle with their android, Johnny 5, trying to find a cure for feline diabetes. A meteor shower destroys their communications array. Johnny and Dagny bang while David tries to repair it. David spies the couple through a window and begins to cry, but only briefly, as he is almost immediately shredded by another meteor shower. A mysterious furry appendage drags his body away.

Episode Two: Ants Marching
Johnny is jonesing for a hit of Buzz Aldro (moon rock slang) and turns hostile toward Dagny. Dagny seeks David for comfort and finds him, but something is different. He is unusually placid. David makes her eggs. Johnny gets in a fight with his dealer over the telecom. On the underside of the ship, it's revealed that the real David is trapped in the web of a giant spider played by Jessica Lange.

Episode Three: Crash Into Me
The spider agrees to spare David if he promises to teach her how to dance. A montage set to an original Randy Newman composition shows the pair hitting it off, eventually banging. Inside the station, Johnny's dealer, Chudge (Ron Perlman) arrives. He is a bigfoot, the last bigfoot. Out of guilt for her actions, Dagny dotes on the mysterious non-David, cooking whatever he wants, not realizing that the satellite was never fixed and no fresh food supplies would be coming. The ship is rocked by an explosion and a gang of space hunters arrive, led by John Lithgow. They aim to kill the last bigfoot.

Episode Four: #41
The crew of four still within the ship hide in a secret compartment in the ship's attic, while the hunters tromp around looking for signs of Chudge. They find scat and fur, but are unable to determine if they are from a bigfoot or from a known species. In an effort to keep his men from being bored, John Lithgow starts hiding behind corners and throwing rocks, then looking at his men all like, "Did you see that!!!???" Then they start a campfire and tell spooky stories. Chudge starts a diary in the attic.

Episode Five: Mercy
With food and moon rock supplies exhausted, Dagny and David are both at each other's throats. Chudge is confused by the new experience and doesn't fully understand why everyone is fighting. Non-David remains placid. Without outside stimulation, the hunters start to develop space madness, clawing out their eyeballs and tongues. On a walkabout around the outside of the station, Real David finds a rose that he begins to nourish. The rose (Frances Conroy) begins to talk with him, issuing curt one-liners like a pez dispenser. The spider spies this interaction and grows jealous.

Episode Six: If Only
Being a simple spider and therefore largely unable to distinguish between humans, the spider sends her brood of tiny spider babes to gobble up the inhabitants of the space station, as revenge for David's relationship with the rose (which she believes to be a smaller human). The horde of little spiders enter the station and lay waste to all but John Lithgow who grabs hold of the broom and sweeps them out of the airlock, along with the broom. Driven mad by what he's witnessed, Lithgow gains the second sight, and learns where the core four are hiding. He marches up there with an old timey blunderbuss, fully intent on slaying them all.

Episode Seven: Two Step
David falls more and more deeply in love with the rose, but she won't return his affection. Rather than live without her, he pledges to die and flings himself off of the station. Realizing that she has lost  her one chance at true love, the rose withers away. Inside the station, Chudge throws himself in front of John Lithgow's musket ball, sacrificing himself for his friends. The real David, caught in the ships orbit after his failed attempt to jump off, comes careening through the entrance to the attic, totally splattering John Lithgow's head against the hull.

Episode Eight: You & Me
Through Chudge's sacrifice, the gang realizes that friendship is most important thing. Also, it turns out that the mysterious David was the real David's doppelgänger, who had been pulled through a trans-dimensional rift when the meteor shredded David Prime. Also, David Beta didn't actually have to eat anything, he was just being polite. The gang shares a laugh about that while Chudge's corpse is roasting over the fire pit. From outside the ship, there's an ominous rumble, followed by the evil voice of the spider lady. She's come for revenge!!!!

Episode Nine: So Much to Say
The Spider Lady slays everyone aboard the ship. The next 37 minutes are a ham-handed monologue about loneliness and what it's like to be an aged lady. Jessica Lange wins an Emmy.

Episode Ten: Lie in Our Graves
Flash-sideways to an alternate universe where everyone's genders are reversed. Things that seem normal in the previous world seem shocking and oppressive. There's gratuitous sexual violence. Everyone learns a valuable lesson.

Episode Eleven: Cry Freedom
Devastated by her newfound loneliness, Spider Lady begins to sing an old fratro spiritual from the dark days of frattel slavery. She spies a beam of light come through the hull. It grows brighter and brighter before finally materializing into the form of Dave Matthews. Dave and the Spider scat-sing a bunch of nonsense. He then reveals himself to the be singularity, an omniscient, omnipotent merging of man and machine. Moved by the spider lady's faith, he restores the lives of everyone on the station. The broom floats back in.

Episode Twelve: Drive In Drive Out
Flashback to heretofore unseen character, Blord, the vampire. A montage of Blord and his father fixing up an old space shuttle runs under VO of Dagny explaining that research scientists and vampires have always been at war - since time immemorial. The montage continues with the vampires invading space stations, building ornate castles in them, seducing the scientist and then running away with their proprietary research. Flashforward to present day and the characters learn that there is a cabal of vampires headed their way. The threat is presented as incredibly severe, but when the vampires arrive, Chudge runs them all over with his motorcycle.

Episode Thirteen: Satellite
David and Dagny complete their research, eventually learning that the cure for feline diabetes was to start an ad campaign encouraging cats to seek out sugar-free sodas. (Cats are capable of thinking and feeling just as deeply, if not more so than humans, but are bred as a food source by their tyrannical simian masters).  Also, everyone learns that what's really important is to let the world know who you are. The characters return to Earth and come out as research scientists, an inter-dimensional clone, a spider monster, a bigfoot, an android, a bunch of hunters, and John Lithgow. Everyone applauds their courage, and, more importantly, the courage of the person who created their platform, Ryan Murphy.

The End...









The End?