That, of course, is more than likely AIDS, a real-life disease that’s killed millions of people around the world and remains one of the globe’s greatest health concerns. Twisted in among the hunt for the serial killer is a mysterious new series of ailments popping up in New York City’s gay community, which lowers the body’s immune response, causing a startling up-tick in unusual diseases and parasites. Winkler also gets to shoot a particularly strange warehouse party involving cats and a faux Klaus Nomi performance artist/singer, as well as a few well-done scenes in an especially concerning leather bar run by Rebecca Dayan’s Alana. Gray’s debut episode affords the director less opportunity to show off from a stylistic standpoint, with Max Winkler’s second episode getting to get a little more showy with scenes of Gino, stumbling drugged out of a pink neon nightmare of a peep show and into the street where some hallucinatory ladies of the evening rescue him from his drugged haze. Denis O’Hare drops in as a delightful Andy Warhol-type in a few exposition-heavy scenes, and fellow AHS veteran Zachary Quinto should be a Hollywood go-to for a sadistic scummy guy with weird sexual proclivities, considering Sam moves from coked-up creep to opportunist pretty quickly in under two hours of screen time. Russell Tovey’s conflicted Patrick doesn’t work quite as well he’s with Gino, but their relationship is more strained than anything else, until the two of them start to actually go about doing detective work. Mantello does brilliant work, particularly when taking Adam under his wing in their pursuit of attention to the Big Daddy killings. He’s not interested in indulging those tastes he seems like he might be a little more old-fashioned in comparison to the hedonistic Theo and Sam. Charlie Carver plays Adam as a remarkably straight-laced type of character in a world that caters to every decadent whim. Of the new faces, Joe Mantello has the most screen time in the first two episodes, and Gino is an important character for the audience to root for since most of the events of the show have revolved around him to some degree. He’s been investigating on his own, and he’s getting in deep with Isaac Powell’s artist Theo Graves and Zachary Quinto’s slimy business manager with a dark side Sam. So he turns to Gino, and really starts getting attention on the plight. When Adam (Charlie Carver, also a producer and co-writer on “Thank You For Your Service”) discovers his roommate is missing and presumed a victim of a leather-strap-clad behemoth known as Big Daddy, he tries to go to the cops for help, and finds Patrick a sympathetic mustache but unable to do much to help him. The Divisive Power of American Horror Story, Ten Years on By Anna Bogutskaya Gino is an openly-gay newspaper reporter for The Native, a small publication centered on the Village, and Patrick is a closeted member of the NYPD who faces significant pressure from his boss, Mac (Kal Penn) not to dig too deeply into a story both men are chasing. Aside from the leather-clad airplane crew member found beheaded by the pier, most of the debut episode is focused on building up the character of Gino (Joe Mantello) and his partner Patrick (Russell Tovey). The setting, 1981 New York City, ticks a lot of positive boxes for me, from the general look of things to the incredible soundtrack, even if it’s a world far different from 2022. “Something’s Coming” starts off slowly, throwing a whole lot of characters at the screen at once in separated story lines, but taking longer to get started for it. It’s strange to see this show not milking every little moment of horror, but if the first two episodes are anything to judge the series by, it’s going to build slowly but get increasingly crazy as things go on. There’s a stabbing, then a cut-away to characters at the bar while screaming happens in the background and people mill around in a panicked fashion. Very little else leading up to the kills could be considered tasteful, but unlike previous seasons of AHS, when a character gets stabbed in the neck in “Thank You For Your Service,” there’s no Grand Guignol blood spray, or even a shot of a person slowly dying in a pool of their own blood. There’s still some of the specific American Horror Story wit in the dialog, but the bulk of the violence is handled off-screen in what is almost a tasteful manner.
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