American Horror Story: Roanoke Season 6 Review

American Horror Story: Roanoke (2011-)
Season 6 - 10 Episodes (2016)

Buy American Horror Story: Roanoke Season 6 on Amazon Video
Created by: Brad Falchuk, Ryan Murphy
Starring: Kathy Bates, Sarah Paulson, Cuba Gooding Jr., Lily Rabe, André Holland, Denis O'Hare, Wes Bentley, Evan Peters, Cheyenne Jackson, Angela Bassett
Rating: TV-MA 

Plot: 
American Horror Story is a horror anthology series. Each season is a self contained story with disparate characters despite using many of the same actors season to season.
Season six is a show within a show, a couple recount spirits encountered at their country home as actors reenact the experience. The origins of the spirits trace back to the lost Roanoke colony.

Verdict
This season had a focus that was lacking last year. While I wondered if this related to the lost colony at all, it is though tangentially. It's a neat link that has no bearing on the season. The show within a show gimmick works, with the first two thirds being a dedicated documentary series and the last third of the season using that to full advantage to create a slasher spoof while we go behind the cameras. This season doesn't have memorable characters like some of the past seasons, but part of that is that most of them are more or less normal. I appreciate this season does things a bit different with the structure, but this isn't even the best haunted house season. American Horror Story  has always been over the top and campy, and this season didn't quite capture that. It's not as much fun.
It depends.

Review
This season of American Horror Story goes for something more grounded as the first two thirds of the season are a show called My Roanoke Nightmare, a docu-series combining interviews and reenactments of a couple's supernatural encounters. I missed that detail in the first episode and couldn't figure out why the actors for the actual experience and the actors that talked about what happened were different people. In episode two, the warnings and dramatic re-enactment note made it clear. Somehow I missed that, but it is a unique structure for this season.

This is basically a haunted house. A couple relocate from L.A. and are harassed by locals, or so they think. A pig man runs around, there are pig children, there's a pagan ritual in the woods. The first few episodes are just weird, especially as I'm wondering how this relates to the Roanoke colony. It turns out the Roanoke colony inhabitants migrated to North Carolina. The colony is still in the woods, demanding a blood sacrifice every year during the blood moon. This season isn't very subtle, though AHS never has been.

We only spend a few minutes actually at the colony. A druid, who is played by Lady Gaga, influenced Kathy Bates character to turn to the dark side basically. It took me a few episodes to realize the druid was Gaga. Then the colony moved to North Carolina. The colony doesn't like outsiders.  The word "Croatoan" that was scrawled into a tree is a warning. If the show explained it more than that, I forgot it. Sometimes you use the word to find off spirits, but not all the time. I like the historical fiction aspect, but I wish it was more than a footnote.

After episode six we get into the larger framework of this show within a show. My Roanoke Nightmare was a big hit so the producer wants to follow up with a reality series that puts everyone related to the show in the haunted house. He's also rigged some fun scares to give the concept some punch. Of course the characters have plenty of drama. You're pitting the 'actors' against the 'real life counterparts' and there's some discord over how the actors played the characters. The actress Kathy Bates plays went mad playing the role of the butcher and isn't invited. That's when this becomes a slasher.

There's also some teens that track down the location of the show and witness some horrific things and then a paranormal investigation show breaks in and experiences even more horror. This is meant to bolster an ending with a heroic sacrifice but the numerous shows within the show just make this a complicated scramble to create a solid conclusion. The main takeaway is that the colony still lurks in the woods. It will never stop.