‘American Horror Story: Apocalypse’ just premiered to… er, mixed reviews, but for fans who still enjoy the series, here is some news that can be seen as either god or bad.  The current season will be one of the shortest, clocking in with just ten episodes.  The first, ‘Murder House’ and the fifth, ‘Hotel’ consisted of 12 episodes a piece, while S2 ‘Asylum’, S3 ‘Coven’ and S4 ‘Freak Show’ ran for thirteen episodes each.  These seasons ran half their episodes in the fall, then took a hiatus during the holidays, to return in the new year.  The longer runs, coupled with that break, however, often led to weak ratings and arguably weak storytelling as earlier seasons tended to start off following one path only to go sideways as new episodes aired.  By cutting S6 ‘Roakoke’ down to ten episodes and S7 ‘Cult’ to eleven, the idea was that these seasons would be leaner and tighter and wouldn’t peter out due to a break between episodes.  Obviously ‘Apocalypse’ ties with ‘Roakoke’ for the shortest series.

But things may not work out as planned.  Reception to the first episode of ‘Apocalypse’ has been a bit lacking.  Many times the first episode can start out slow, so that isn’t anything new, but with fewer episodes in which to tell the story, it might have made sense for this to kick off a little faster.  And then there is last year’s ‘Cult’ and to a lesser degree ‘Roakoke’ which were not well-received.

‘AHS’ is still a hit for FX, which has already ordered two additional seasons.  So regardless, Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk will be back and will most likely bringing along their regular cast of series players.  Unfortunately, this new season was hotly anticipated as it would bring back many of these actors in their most iconic roles from ‘Murder House’ and ‘Coven’, but so far, most of them were absent from the first new episode.

How did you feel about the first new episode?  How do you feel about ‘Apocalypse’ being one of the shortest seasons?

Source: Collider