Ryan Murphy's Inferno: Notes on Television's Leading Auteur

Deadline reports that Hulu's All's Fair has been officially renewed for a second season, marking yet another entry in the sprawling Ryan Murphy universe, which now includes paranormal anthologies, more paranormal anthologies, crime anthologies, serial killer anthologies, famous actress rivalry anthologies and now legal procedurals. The man stays busy, but the internet stays busier.

Like most television not blessed to be on CBS and about firefighters or cops, All's Fair arrived in an internet climate primed to dissect just about anything that crosses the "Trending" tab. Throw in a few character actresses, outlandish costumes and jokes that gay people can pick apart and one has the perfect vessel through which to capture every thought by every living person still cursed to have the X app on their phone.

Involve Kim Kardashian and consider calling Amazon Web Services and Cloudflare to pump extra server juice into the worldwide web, lest the whole thing buckle under the weight of a neurotic entertainment media ecosystem overstuffed with opinions about things everyone will pretend to hate but insist on tweeting about.

We at PAPER are not exempt from this exercise, to be clear. Consider writer Tobias Hess' accurate assessment of Murphy's surrealist approach to narrative writing: "This show is equal parts Twitter reaction video, Selling Sunset interstitial visual and something you’d see at a Liberal Arts experimental theatre program."

As long as there have been blogs, there have been breathless screeds from voyeurs like myself that read like the run-on sentence of a person raining brimstone down on unsuspecting tourists outside Madison Square Garden. "Hark! Kim Kardashian's wooden visage is positively unhinged! Witness her stomp through a scene in perfectly polished Louboutins while Naomi Watts wanders through a Lynchian b-plot with the world's funniest woman, Niecy Nash! Prostrate yourself before the wildest television this side of the Murphy-verse — the most unhinged show ever cooked up by gay people in a lab funded by the Illuminati with the express directive to undermine society and rewrite the rules of Hollywood itself."

The website that immediately came to mind for my dear readers probably paid $300 for the piece. Everyone I know got to share the link online without reading it, to show they're "in" on the joke between Brooklyn gay guy tweets with screen caps and reaction videos from All's Fair that read: "This is a joke you've already seen about trade."

Let me not overestimate the power of mean gay discourse, which has its limits, judging by the deserved success of the Las Culturistas hosts (hi, boys!) and just about every pop star the general public actually gives money too. But it certainly works its wonders, judging by the ironic split between a 3 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes and the 3.2 million views it garnered in the first three days of streaming.

Either the pans and jokes propelled everyone to see what all the fuss is about or Ryan Murphy has shooters. Whichever is worst for the future of television is likely the answer.

For me, it illustrates the uselessness of "hate-watching" as an interesting or at all accurate estimation of what's actually happening in the new-streaming environment. As Hollywood studios continue to coalesce and rollback on the promise of the streaming age, flooding the ecosystem with ads and remixed "live television" stations, how useful is "hate" as a word to describe something everyone with a television has watched? Not at all, as I see it. No, this is a hellish new combination of second screen dopamine withdrawals and the "in group" dynamics that propelled the likes of Mad Men and Game of Thrones into the stratosphere of the now-lost golden age.

People will watch what they perceive others as being in the know about, a function of Twitter turned X that fell apart as the platform became increasingly hostile and fragmented. Similarly, internet media has become increasingly competitive as it relates to not only grabbing attention, but retaining it, even when relegated to a picture-in-picture window over the dual social media scroll. These two forces, when joined, form a media framework Ryan Murphy is the singular master of.

He creates television that all but forces the viewer to watch and post at the same time. How else would the man launch fifteen television shows since 2020, with three of those coming in 2026. This, of course, does not include the multiple seasons of American Horror Story, American Crime Story, Feud, 9-1-1 and Pose that also dropped post 2020.

Should anyone feel the Niecy Nash reaction video and Kim Kardashian bar exam joke withdrawals set in while the second season is still in production: I heard that 9-1-1 just featured a plot line about meteors blowing up gay Los Angeles paramedics.

Image via Getty