Pilot Season – American Gothic

    Shaun Cassidy may have some problems with women.

    I vaguely remembered ‘American Gothic’ as being one of Sam Raimi’s side projects and I was almost entirely wrong. He was certainly involved but only through his production company, Renaissance Pictures. 1995 was a big year for them, it was the same year that ‘Hercules: The Legendary Journeys’ and “Xena: Warrior Princess” debuted, so his attention may have been a bit elsewhere. He did lend the show composer Joseph LoDuca, an associate of theirs, and some of the camera work in the pilot is reminiscent of Raimi’s signature mobile camera style, and that seems to be about it.

    Instead the driving force of the series was former pop star Shaun Cassidy who was transitioning into television writing and production at the time. This was the first show he spearheaded and would go on to be involved in some fairly interesting shows such as the alien-suspense series ‘Invasion’ (three guesses what that show’s about), ‘Roar,’ and “Emerald City.’ Maybe one of the series he was involved with made it past the first season but he’s apparently pretty good at getting shows onto the air in the first place.

Pour one out for poor, misunderstood Grant Wood.

    The show takes place in the town of Trinity, South Carolina. The opening narration is done by Gary Cole as Sheriff Lucas Buck, the man who not-so-secretly runs the town from behind the scenes, and is about how everyone’s lives would be hunky dory if they just did what he told them to do. The first scene proper takes place in a run-down house where a boy, Caleb, is being given a begrudging birthday party by this already-drunk father. His older sister, dressed up essentially as a porcelain doll, is played by baby Sarah Paulson. She’s clearly been directed by someone who’s heard descriptions of Tennessee Williams’ stories but had never actually read one as she starts to repeat the phrase ‘someone’s at the door’ and acting all twitchy. Things escalate quickly and soon Caleb and his sister are barricaded in a room with the father battering down the door.

    Caleb smashes out a window and goes running for help, coming across Sheriff Buck in the woods. This could either be lazy writing or foreshadowing and by the end of the episode I’m still not sure. The two of them and a deputy race back to the house. Sheriff Buck finds the father standing over his daughter, shovel in hand, distraught at what he’s done. Sheriff Buck ushers him from the room, goes back to the girl, and after making a few comforting noises snaps her neck.

    It’s at this point that the show has a decision to make: soap opera or horror? Either one would work. A kind of modern reworking of an older-style melodrama set in a South still thinking of itself as part of the past but slowly changing would be interesting. A town overseen by a corrupt sheriff, characters hopping beds, a traumatized little boy as our window into it all. Or we could go full on supernatural, have the sheriff as an active corrupting influence spreading malevolence over the town, bringing people into his orbit as he slowly puts a plan together to summon Satan or something. I have a feeling they were leaning into the second one but they didn’t fully commit so all of the supernatural in this pilot is crammed in at the end and barely rises above what could be waved away as hallucinations, which would work in a two-hour pilot but gets blunted significantly when you stick a week’s break in the middle.

    There’s some decent work going on here. Gary Cole is, of course, terrific, and is the absolute center of the show. He can flip from charismatically affable to quietly menacing in an instant and make them both believable. The entire show needed to be centered on him. Caleb is fine as a viewpoint character but in the pilot he’s just sad and reactive and we’re given no reason to care about him except for the fact that The Sheriff does. The rest of the characters, even Sarah Paulson, are barely sketched in, with the possible exception of Buck’s deputy who spends the episode wracked with guilt about witnessing The Sheriff killing the girl. Some of the best scenes are Buck just absently fucking with him and making sure he’s under control.

    I glanced over the episode synopses for the rest of the season and was frankly a little underwhelmed. I remember being interested in this show back when it aired but never managed to catch it and was hoping it was like ‘The Others,’ a forgotten little gem. Unfortunately from everything I read it sounds like the network started actively screwing with the show from about the midpoint on. They aired it wildly out of order, replaced one character with an almost identical one halfway through the season, that sort of thing. Not that you can blame it all on the suits of course, apparently plot points would be raised and then forgotten, characterizations would flip depending on the needs of individual episodes, and remember what I said about Shaun Cassidy and women?

    I need to be a little careful, I suppose, I don’t know anything about Shaun Cassidy in the real world, but here is a summation of everything involving the women characters on this show: one witnesses her mother being raped, goes fiction-style insane, is murdered, and then turns into a ghost whose sole function is to guide our main, male character. There’s Caleb’s mom who is only introduced so she can be raped by Sheriff Buck and then give birth to Caleb. There’s Caleb’s cousin who is awkwardly shoe-horned into the episode who has dead parents and is only around to both avenge them and help Caleb. And then there’s the local schoolteacher who nebulously works with Sheriff Buck and sleeps with both him and anyone he tells her to because apparently she’s just always super horny.

    I’m still not sure what the actual point of this show is or what any of the characters actually want. Sheriff Buck wants to adopt Caleb for some reason and everyone else is reacting to that and that’s really all I can figure out. The supporting cast are either on the Sheriff’s side or on Caleb’s with the rest of the town barely acting as a backdrop, which I suppose is fine for the pilot but I get the sense it never gets much better for the show as a whole.

    To pull out my increasingly creaky pilot list: establish the premise, demonstrate how it would function as an ongoing series, and establish the characters. I’m not really sure that this manages to do any of these, not entirely. There’s a plot for this individual episode but I have no real idea of what the show would be after that except maybe The Sheriff trying to adopt Caleb again and again. I get no sense how it would function as an ongoing series. I like the idea of a corrupt Sheriff and how the town handles that but that’s not really what they’re doing here. The only character established with any kind of presence is Sheriff Buck and while that performance is almost enough by itself it’s really not for an ongoing television show.

    The overall gist that I get is that this was a muddled show that started with some promise but got pushed around by the network in a quest for ratings. If there was a show bible, an end point they were working towards, they managed to keep it pretty secret from the audience. Apparently they knew going into the last episodes of the show that they weren’t getting renewed and still ended it on a cliffhanger, which is a dick move. I really did want to like this show but I get zero sense that this was going anywhere I would find particularly interesting.