If you’ve been watching ‘American Horror Story’ this season, then the crazy-sexy-weirdness of this runaway narrative train should be no surprise to you. What might come as a surprise however, is the news that the season finale is going to be chopped down to 90 minutes from its original 2 hours.
Deadline.com reported yesterday that the aggressive shooting schedule of the series led to the decision to trim the season one finale down. Seeing as some episodes were taking 8 days to shoot instead of 7, and everything’s been shooting forward like a rocket since the October 5 premiere, the final episode would’ve finished shooting on December 15. This would’ve left basically zero time for post production before the air date of December 21.
But what about pushing the finale to December 28? It’s a logical question, except it’s the holiday season and it didn’t make much sense to go that route or to push the series finale into the new year. It didn’t help matters that show creators Brad Falchuk and Ryan Murphy couldn’t even work on the pilot until late May; after wrapping the second season of ‘Glee’. Heck, the show got picked up not two weeks after the pilot was shown to the network in July. This meant they had to already rush like crazy to make the October 5 premiere.
FX president John Landgraf has been meeting with Murphy for a few weeks already about the season finale. There was an option to drop the 13th episode altogether and run only an hour-long finale. However, Murphy managed to come up with enough material for the 90-minute finale that would still satisfy viewers.
For my money, the crazy-sexy-weirdness of the show can only benefit from a truncated season finale. We’ve gotten revelation after revelation this season and, while a two-hour finale would have been amazing, I’m sure the 90-minute version is going to give us just as many questions as it does answers.
