“You’ve got to make some noise and you’ve got to be brave. I like weird. I like to make bold, bat-shit crazy stories that no one else will touch.”

—RYAN MURPHY
EXECUTIVE PRODUCER/CREATOR/SHOWRUNNER/DIRECTOR AMERICAN HORROR STORY, THE NORMAL HEART THE PEOPLE V. O.J. SIMPSON: AMERICAN CRIME STORY FEUD, GLEE, NIP/TUCK

Chapter 6

Spotlight on a Rebel

Ryan Murphy Reinvents the Mini-Series by Embracing His Inner Outsider

As a gay teenager growing up in Indianapolis, Ryan Murphy always felt like an outsider. And yet, even though he felt he’d never be the prom king, captain of the football team or student body president, he felt a need to fit in—on his own terms. Visiting UCLA School of Theater, Film, and Television in March 2017, just prior to the launch of his latest limited series, Feud, Murphy admitted, “Everything I’ve done can be distilled down to ambition.”

On the business side, his ambition was the gateway to power and prosperity. On the personal side for Murphy and his myriad cast of characters, ambition is the prerequisite to earning respect, acceptance and love. It’s the ticket to their dreams. And Ryan Murphy dreams BIG. Even as a Catholic altar boy, Murphy’s ambition wasn’t simply to be accepted by the church. “I wanted to be the Pope,” he says with a laugh. Ironically, ambition is also the Achilles’ heel of most of his characters. If you don’t play, you can’t win. But that doesn’t mean the game isn’t rigged against you. Therein lies the paradox of his sensibility: Outsiders determined to be insiders while remaining true to themselves.

Why Can’t I Be Audrey Hepburn?

Murphy began his writing career as a journalist, always on tight deadlines and just scraping by financially; he developed his work ethic based on basic survival. If he didn’t meet his deadlines and post a story, he didn’t eat. Before he became one of the most prolific, iconoclastic, powerful showrunners in Hollywood, Murphy couldn’t afford the luxury of being an outlier/provocateur. But when his very first screenplay, a romantic comedy entitled Why Can’t I Be Audrey Hepburn?, sold right out of the gate to Steven Spielberg, Murphy got a taste of being Hollywood’s “it boy.” Soon enough, however, those delicious, dizzying highs led him into the trap of Hollywood development hell. Even though Why Can’t I Be Audrey Hepburn? never got produced, it propelled Murphy into working on other rom-coms, including his stint on the ill-fated romantic comedy with a gay twist, The Next Best Thing, starring Madonna and Rupert Everett. While Murphy concedes the agony and ecstasy of working with Madonna, he knew he’d never be satisfied being pigeonholed as a rom-com writer when he’d only written one screenplay. “You should never listen to anyone who wants to put you in a box,” he reflects. He also knew that as a screenwriter of movies, a medium in which the director is king/queen, he was disposable and powerless.

It’s the opposite in series television. In TV, the creator/writer/executive producer (a/k/a showrunner) calls all or most of the shots. Murphy could thereby embrace the themes that most resonated with him. His foray into television was the wry, edgy teen soap, Popular, which aired on the now-defunct WB network. Murphy had other options, but he gravitated toward The WB (an early iteration of what has evolved into The CW) because Popular felt like a good companion piece to The WB’s other hits, Dawson’s Creek and Felicity. Or at least that’s how it looked on the surface. But while Dawson’s Creek and Felicity earnestly explored high school and college teen angst, Popular was designed to subvert the tropes of the coming-of-age drama series. On the surface, these series fit into the same audience demographic and genre, but only Popular had a dark underbelly of satire. Murphy wasn’t interested in celebrating and honoring a world in which he didn’t fit. A more apt title for his first series might have been Unpopular. Or Pretty Ugly. To Murphy, the joke was on The WB; they thought they were making yet another teen soap, but Murphy’s aim was to make fun of their other shows through heightened style and wry subtext. His first series taught him:

While Popular only lasted two seasons (spanning 43 episodes from 1999–2001), it served as Murphy’s crash course in, not only running a writers’ room, but also in being supervising producer and co-showrunner. Coming from a background in journalism, Murphy was remarkably adept at investigating how all the moving parts of the writing and production machine coalesced. Yes, he was interested in exploring the lives of outsiders in high school, but he also had other obsessions that excited his artistic soul: from casting and production design, to music choices and marketing. He not only became a master storyteller, but also learned how to make an ambitious TV series on budget and on time. He learned how to fight back against Standards and Practices at The WB network and that, if he was going to devote his life to making a TV series, it had better be something that resonated with him on a deeply personal level.

Popular challenged him to reconcile his ambitious desires with his artistic needs and cemented his subsequent career trajectory. He loved the medium of television, but his aim was not to follow a network mandate. It was to be a disruptor. So rather than conform to Hollywood’s expectations of him, he acted from his outsider instinct and did just the opposite. He “leaned in” (his current favorite expression) to societal and cultural taboos and eschewed the mainstream in favor of reviving moribund genres and subjects. Whether it’s high school cheerleaders and glee club or classic “old” Hollywood films, Murphy’s work is about reconciling and revisiting the past. As he points out:

He casts actors that Hollywood has written off as old or out of vogue (John Travolta, Jessica Lange, Cuba Gooding, Kathy Bates) in leading roles. He refers to his approach to luring these stage icons into series television as “talent seduction,” and it’s all about conveying to actors that he intends to put them in roles they’d never see themselves doing. He approaches each screen legend as a genuine fan and then encourages them to shake up their comfort zones, to do the opposite of what everyone may expect of them.

The same holds true to the way he’s built his movie and television empire. Murphy chooses a new project, in part, by the desire to pivot 180 degrees away from its antecedent. Follow a show about high school cheerleaders with an adult bromance set in Miami in the plastic surgery industry, toss in the taboos of pedophilia, drug dealers, and envelope-pushing gore and sex scenes, and we have Murphy’s breakthrough series, Nip/Tuck. His tonal influences were Mike Nichols’ classic relationship roundelay, Carnal Knowledge, along with some stylistic flourishes borrowed from Stanley Kubrick. Murphy was so convinced he had to shoot the Nip/Tuck pilot on 35mm film that he paid for the film stock out of his own pocket. He didn’t just want to pivot from a difficult, oppressive experience on Popular; he wanted to reinvent the look of a TV series—which dovetailed perfectly with FX’s brand sensibility not to make anything that could air on a traditional broadcast network.

Nip/Tuck’s signature opening line in every episode’s teaser, “Tell me what you don’t like about yourself,” sets the tone and theme of this groundbreaking, controversial series. It also hit the sweet spot of Murphy’s outsider themes—but now he was dealing not with coming-of-age, but with aging in a youth-obsessed culture. While the characters in Popular couldn’t wait to grow up, the patients and doctors on Nip/Tuck were afraid of growing old, of being unlovable, of being abandoned.

Even though Nip/Tuck is a show set in a specific, elite world, Murphy intuitively grasped, paradoxically, that the more specifically he delved into a character’s perceived deficiencies, the more universal his or her woes would become to the audience. Is there a human being alive on the planet who doesn’t “not like” something about him or herself?

He got this now iconic line of dialogue, verbatim, from a doctor when he was researching the world of plastic surgeons. As a gay man who’s never been thrilled with his own physical appearance in the age of Calvin Klein model perfection, Murphy hit pay dirt by tapping into our collective dissatisfactions with body image and aging, coupled with the glamor and wish fulfillment that anyone can be beautiful and sexy if they have enough money. The tone is as sharp as a scalpel. Murphy wasn’t interested in writing a morality tale. Nip/Tuck isn’t a cautionary treatise on the pitfalls of vanity. For Murphy, it is a heterosexual love story: two rich, successful, straight men who negotiate the power dynamics of a marriage through their partnership in their medical practice; as a gay outsider, this is what interested Murphy most. He was writing as a means to get inside the psyches of powerful, entitled, white alpha males. But Murphy was also doing something more trailblazing in the TV business. He was bucking an established genre: the medical procedural drama, one of the most stalwart stables of the broadcast television networks, from Marcus Welby, MD and ER to Grey’s Anatomy and House.

Audiences were accustomed to watching shows about eternally well-intentioned doctors diagnosing and curing. Healers with complicated love lives. But Nip/Tuck was about plastic surgeons who performed elective surgery for profit. They rarely, if ever, tried to talk a patient out of a surgical makeover. It was a show that worked against the grain of the Hippocratic oath; it wasn’t “First, do no harm.” It was stoking their patients’ insecurities, promising superficial perfection with no money-back guarantees, while never promising that the surgery would lead to fulfillment. Their job wasn’t to make patients get well but to feel better about themselves. But Murphy also understands that obsession only leads to more obsession. Beauty isn’t only skin-deep; it’s also ephemeral.

Ryan Murphy has built an empire based upon characters striving against impossible odds to stay on top. To retain their fleeting fame. To never wake up from the American Dream. He writes stories about postponing the inevitable. If Nip/Tuck espouses anything absolute, it’s the law of gravity: What goes up, must come down. Nothing lasts forever.

American Horror Story also has its roots in the shame of body image. The horror genre itself emerged from adolescents being horrified by the changes in their bodies, from acne to errant hairs sprouting up, from metabolisms slowing down and the difficulty to stay fit and adorable through awkward growth phases, when size and thighs seem to matter most. As adolescents, we all strive to fit in and belong, and when we stumble or fail, we find ourselves relating to Stephen King’s Carrie. If only we all had telekinetic powers to bring down those pig’s-blood-spewing pranksters at the senior prom.

Murphy recognizes that we all have our dark sides but also that the key to success is not to pit hero against villain, but to pit outsiders against those who seek to persecute and oppress them. In Murphy’s case, he considers himself the outsider and the Hollywood studios and networks the oppressors. One would presume that, with Murphy’s track record and stature in show business, he can do whatever he wants. But not everything he proposes to FX and Fox execs is an automatic green-light. Ryan Murphy has to endure rejection, too. Not everything grows into a phenomenon. Scream Queens was a disappointment. And other pilot pitches failed to launch—which only serves to galvanize Murphy’s restless creative spirit and ambition.

He convinced Jessica Lange to do a TV series, despite her apprehensions, by telling her he wouldn’t take “no” for an answer and by promising her he’d move heaven and earth to make the production schedule work for her needs. Thus, a temporary roadblock to securing the Academy Award-winning legend helped shape the parameters of Murphy’s winning business model for reinventing the TV mini-series.

If Jessica Lange didn’t want to commit to a traditional TV series order of 22 episodes, Murphy would scale the order back to ten episodes per season. That, in itself, was a revolutionary, game-changing approach to bringing movie stars into the TV series business. But Murphy had another strategy in mind that would subvert the audience’s expectations of a TV series while surreptitiously transcending them. Murphy isn’t solely a showrunner; he’s also a showman. He has an uncanny barometer for pleasing an audience by not giving them what they want or expect. He’s not calculating and deliberate in this strategy; it’s simply his instinct. If something has been done a certain way for decades, he’s not trying to conform. His instinct is to turn convention on its head and do the exact opposite.

When American Horror Story: Murder House first premiered on FX in 2011, the audience presumed it was an edgy but “regular” TV series, akin to a show such as The Walking Dead (another big influence on Murphy). In AHS, each week, as the thrills and chills continued to escalate and become more perverse, all the while paying homage¹ to classic horror movies for the younger, uninitiated viewers (from Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist to The Shining), audiences kept wondering: How the hell is this show going to sustain for multiple seasons? Our built-in expectations of a weekly TV series provided us with the presumption that a successful ongoing TV series must sustain. American Horror Story debunked that convention at the end of Season 1 when everyone died and the (haunted) house burned down.

As viewers, we were stunned. How could that happen? Hadn’t Mr. Murphy and his writing/producing partner, Brad Falchuk, written themselves into a corner? How could a haunted house/exorcism story go on with no cast and no house? Now this was groundbreaking television. Everything about this Season 1 finale felt wrong—except that it was all by design. This scorched-earth surprise ending was daring, diabolical and mind-blowing. Social media message boards exploded. Everyone was talking about it. Murphy’s gambit paid off. He had the most buzzed-about show on the air, and no one knew what could or would happen next. Was this a one-off mini-series? Was it all just a dream and Season 2 would reveal that they were all alive and ready for the next round of latex bodysuits and supernatural bloodbaths? Like his oeuvre or not, herein lies Ryan Murphy’s genius: He provokes and tantalizes us to want more, but he never delivers what we’re expecting. That’s a given for any showman (or woman).

After the success of Glee for the Fox network—which was his customary pivot to the polar opposite of his previous venture (Nip/Tuck for FX)—Murphy grew weary of the standard 22-episode order. So when he was able to coerce Jessica Lange into doing a TV series by promising a short-order series, he was also alleviating his own sense of restlessness and obligation by voluntarily selling FX on the idea of a limited series. Back then, TV showrunners were all about getting the largest number of episodes possible to be green-lit by the network. Bigger orders translate into bigger salaries for the writers, producers, actors—everyone, as well as the stability of more work. Bigger orders also offered the promise of lucrative syndication deals when a popular series goes into reruns.

For decades, the TV business’ profitability was entirely based on a deficit-financing model. Up until a given series could bank 80 to 100 episodes, the licensing fee paid by TV networks to the studios would never fully cover production costs. And so the TV studios/production companies would always produce the show at a loss, and it was only the promise of a future syndication deal that yielded big profits. But, as we all know, the TV business has radically changed into an on-demand ecosystem. Streaming and premium cable networks operate not from advertising revenue, but on a steady diet of monthly subscription fees paid by viewers. HBO pioneered this subscription model with their original series, first with Oz and later with The Sopranos and Sex in the City.

Netflix then bested HBO by circumventing the pilot process and green-lighting a show straight to full series order. Netflix also rejected scheduling their series into rigid (linear) timeslots and offered an entire season of a show all at once—which inadvertently gave us the term “binge viewing” (a term that Netflix doesn’t embrace because it sounds like an eating disorder). Nevertheless, with viewers now in control of when, where and what to watch, overnight Nielsen TV ratings have become obsolete, and traditional syndication revenue streams have also been impacted. Yes, there are still TV series that make 22 (or more) episodes per season and will score substantial syndication deals from what were once known as “second window” streaming services (such as Hulu). But the TV content landscape has changed so significantly that the metric for a syndication payday has diminished from the requisite 80 to 100 episodes to as few as 6 episodes.

Yes, that’s right. Six episodes. In an on-demand TV ecosystem with (at this writing) over 450 scripted series across multiple platforms, no sentient human can possibly watch everything. There’s just too much content to consume. Personally, I don’t view too many choices as a bad thing—and that’s the secret sauce in a powerhouse operation such as Netflix; they needn’t worry about overnight TV ratings. What they must do is keep their monthly subscribers satisfied with something new to watch—constantly. Something “new” may constitute a Netflix original series (Marseille, El Chapo, Marvel’s Jessica Jones), or it may constitute an episode of Breaking Bad for those Netflix subscribers who may have missed its first run on AMC. In this way, anything old can be new again as long as the subscriber hasn’t seen it before. It’s new to them. As Breaking Bad’s creator/showrunner Vince Gilligan himself pointed out, they didn’t get much traction when they first aired on AMC. “Netflix was our lifeline,” Gilligan declares.

The Pop Culture Junkie

Murphy both follows and sets trends the way only an outsider can: With his face pressed up against the glass. He consumes culture as much as he dictates and programs to it in clever, totally outside-the-box ways. Given that American Horror Story airs not on a streaming or premium cable platform but on basic cable, advertiser-supported FX, Murphy knew that a 10-episode series would be an untenable business model for an ongoing TV series. Murphy is a dreamer and striver, but he’s also pragmatic and knows that you don’t build an audience by killing off all the regular characters at the end of the already attenuated first season. And how many TV studios are likely to burn their main location down to the ground? Who does that?

Ryan Murphy had to turn “no” into “yes.” The story of his life. So, he came up with a new business model: the limited anthology series.

The Limited Anthology Series

• Instead of an unsustainable one-season wonder, what if American Horror Story could be the umbrella to a new form of anthology series in which each season would continue not with the same story, but on the same theme? The common denominator would be the genre: horror. The opening credits would use the same (chilling) music and (unsettling graphic) imagery to provide a sense of cohesion for the audience. But each season would tell a new horror story set in a new US city and/or different time period. Murder House was set in 1978 and 2011 in Los Angeles; Asylum was set in 1964 and 2012 in rural Massachusetts; Coven took place in both 1834 and 2013 New Orleans; Freak Show was entirely set in Jupiter, Florida, in 1952; Hotel, present-day LA; and Roanoke in present-day North Carolina, with reference points back to the notorious Roanoke Colony mass disappearance, circa 1590. The seasons utilize flashbacks to establish series mythology and backstory.
• Rather than starting over with a whole new cast of characters, what if Murphy invited back several of the same actors in repertory fashion, akin to the films of Orson Welles, Woody Allen and Christopher Guest? They’d be playing entirely different roles, but the audience would still be satiated with one of the main staples of series television: familiarity. It would also be fun to see such famous faces—Lange, Bates, Angela Bassett and the then up-and-coming Sarah Paulson—playing different roles. The idea of using the same repertory company was an idea that had come and gone. “It was dead, moribund. It fascinated me,” says Murphy.
• Many of the actors would play all-new roles, but they would stay on Murphy’s theme of exploring outsiders. To invigorate his blossoming mega-franchise (AHS has already been picked up by FX through at least 2019), Murphy could also lean into stunt casting.² So when Jessica Lange needs a break, Lange steps out, and in steps Lady Gaga in Season 5, AHS: Hotel.
• Murphy is also into the idea of reinvention. Inspired by William Holden playing Joe Gillis (the drowned screenwriter narrating his own story from the bottom of has-been Norma Desmond’s swimming pool) in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard, Ryan Murphy loves the idea of taking an actor on the wane or off the Hollywood radar and casting him or her in a principal role. Using this philosophy, Murphy “just knew” that John Travolta would make the perfect Robert Shapiro in The People v. O.J. Simpson; to convince the network brass, Murphy even paid Travolta’s salary out of his own pocket and gave up some of his back-end points. Murphy’s approach to avoiding self-conscious parody when using big-name actors to impersonate real-life people is to encourage his actors not to imitate, but to “find the essence of the person.” For when an actor impersonates, he/she tends to lose the emotion. “And emotion is everything.”
• For further cohesion, the twitchy, disturbing, Se7en-inspired title sequences all use that same catchy, yet disturbing, industrial music and stylized graphics, but with different iconography for each season; these indelible title sequences are also all about setting the right tone. As Murphy explains, it’s telling the audience, “This is how you’re supposed to feel, tonally, on a molecular level.”
• Murphy and his team carefully embed “Easter eggs” to foreshadow not only what’s to come in each season’s new iteration of the anthological franchise, but also to simultaneously pay homage to past seasons. This provides the audience with an interactive component, a means for social media interaction, buzzy speculation of what’s to come, increased suspense and controversy—ingredients for success in TV.

This format and formula proved to be both financially rewarding for FX by virtue of their ability to repurpose episodes on streaming networks and also by selling each full season into foreign markets, as horror is the most desired and easily exportable genre. Et voilà! Murphy had his ideal sandbox in which to play with his most personal obsessions: ambition, power, outsiders looking for love and validation. Notice the recurring theme of ambition: On American Horror Story, even demons, ghosts, witches, cannibals and other restless spirits seek power and dominance. In Ryan Murphy’s world, everybody wants to be on top.

Now he has a bona fide franchise and an endless supply of new horror stories to explore. He’s married the anthology format of The Twilight Zone and its 21st-century British counterpart, Black Mirror, with the once tried-and-true TV mini-series (Roots, Holocaust, The Thorn Birds) and has reinvigorated both formats into the hybridized limited/anthology series. HBO has tried to jump on the bandwagon with its True Detective limited anthology series—which was subjected to the law of diminished returns in its less successful second season, although a promising-sounding third is on the way (more on this in Chapter 2). And FX has cannibalized its own format and provided us with Noah Hawley’s richly satisfying TV adaptation of the Coen Brothers’ Fargo. I suspect we’ll see more of this format for years to come.

Impossible = Possible

Ryan Murphy gravitates toward seemingly impossible-to-produce projects. Case in point: the film adaptation of Larry Kramer’s landmark play (first performed in 1985), The Normal Heart. Its development languished for more than 20 years as Barbra Streisand’s pet project before she let the option lapse, and Murphy fortuitously came to the rescue. Every project of Murphy’s is in fact his pet project, but this was his most personal because it dealt with the devastation within the gay community from the AIDS epidemic. Murphy survived, but the losses and impact on his life were immeasurable. He considers it a miracle that he’s still alive today. “I never expected to live past 32,” he offers. This void has fueled his sense of urgency to tell the stories he most needs to; he understands that time is fleeting and that every day matters.

Most writers and directors in Hollywood work as outsiders until they achieve enough clout to become insiders. But Murphy’s unprecedented success has come from embracing his outsider status. What is arguably his greatest career achievement to date, The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story, came to fruition when, after six seasons of Glee (2009–2015), Murphy asked his longtime agent Joe Cohen at CAA to send him the best projects he’s ever read that can’t ever seem to get made.

When he first read the title page of a script by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski (Ed Wood, The People vs. Larry Flynt), Murphy rolled his eyes and thought, “No way. Anything but O.J.” Alexander and Karaszewski had written the first two episodes based upon the bestselling nonfiction book by Jeffrey Toobin. Despite the creative auspices of powerhouse producer and former president of Walt Disney Pictures, Nina Jacobson (The Hunger Games), The People v. O.J. Simpson had never been produced. As Murphy recounts, “I love the feeling of championing a project that seems impossible.”

Marcia, Marcia, Marcia

Despite his disinterest in reopening the O.J. trial, Murphy quickly became hooked by the material. Not because it reinforced what he already knew, but because he discovered new things. What jumped out at him was the central role not of O.J., but of the outsider: Marcia Clark (Sarah Paulson, who won an Emmy for her portrayal). Murphy saw Marcia as his way into the story: “I understood her. She was an outsider, a woman surrounded by straight, white, condescending men.” Murphy wasn’t interested in the rise and fall of O.J. He was interested in the race issues and the misogyny. He wanted Marcia Clark to be the lead and also to depict the other attorneys on the case, but with greater dimension. He wanted us to go home with the characters and get a deeper perspective on the case. That was a given. But what elevated this “true crime” story into its own genre was, once again, tone.

Just as Popular had subverted and satirized the teen angst high school tropes, Murphy knew from the get-go that he wanted to tonally explore this landmark trial as a satire. Stylistically, his greatest influence for making The People v. O.J. was the 1976 movie Network, the Paddy Chayefsky/Sydney Lumet masterpiece. Murphy also knew it was time for him to demonstrate his maturity and confidence as a now-seasoned director. He began this new approach when directing The Normal Heart (HBO, 2014) and continues to evolve as a director. Instead of showy camera work, he decided to utilize a more cinéma vérité approach. If he’d been criticized for cinematic acrobatics, of showing off to prove his directing prowess, he now simplified his approach. “I never move the camera anymore. Ever.” By not trying so hard, he found his critical acclaim and mainstream acceptance.

It should also be noted that, even once Murphy decided he wanted to make The People v. O.J. his next project, he had to audition and campaign for the job. He wanted to do ten episodes and “cast the shit out of it.” But it was an uphill battle. And despite all the acclaim, Murphy says that he is confused by its success. “I never understood it. I still don’t.”

He continues to expand his TV empire with the American Crime Story franchise, plus a fresh assortment of limited, anthological true stories to explore in future seasons: from Hurricane Katrina to the Versace Murder. For the next iterations of American Crime Story, he’s not interested in doing another trial. He wants to explore the looting, politics, inequality and racism of a perfect storm and breached levees. For Versace, he wants to explore a social crime that involves homophobia. And with Pose (more in Chapter 12), Murphy has made history with the largest cast of transgender actors.³

But rather than creating a documentary, à la Making a Murderer on Netflix and The Jinx on HBO, Murphy is recreating these stories through his own fisheye lens. He does not feel the moral responsibility to use his storytelling and TV cache to be a social activist on screen; he’s not interested in preaching. “I never consciously think about social activism. My work just contains themes that are important to me.”

When structuring the dramatic narrative to a true-life story, Murphy relies on theme. He’s adding layers to the story, not just plot. His approach as writer/creator is the same as his process for directing. He needs to know his first shot and last shot to establish tone.

Murphy also makes vision boards (à la The Secret) and gets obsessed with even the most minute details. He notoriously spent two days choosing the right fish for the aquarium in the Nip/Tuck doctor’s office. He also gets obsessed with color palettes and design elements. Being a showrunner is the ideal job for him because he loves making taste-based decisions and delegating to his team—all in the service of tone.

For his most recent limited/anthological series, Feud: Bette and Joan (on FX), which focuses on the rivalry between Bette Davis and Joan Crawford during the making of the cult movie Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, Murphy was not interested in doing camp. Instead, “I was interested in the idea of a career being over by the age of 52” (the same age Murphy was when the series premiered). He wanted to explore female competition and how some women tend to undermine each other instead of uniting. This first installment of Feud is, in Murphy’s words, “A horror show about inequality”—a feeling all too familiar to outsider Murphy.

The Feud: Bette and Joan series was inspired by a screenplay Murphy had discovered from The Black List,⁴ years earlier. He’d originally acquired that script, entitled Best Actress (written by Jaffe Cohen and Michael Zam, who are both credited as co-creators and producers on Feud: Bette and Joan). Murphy’s original intention was to adapt and direct it as a feature film starring Jessica Lange and Susan Sarandon. Even with both actresses attached, the financing and distribution kept the project in limbo for years.

The next limited season of Feud will focus on Princess Diana and Prince Charles, but Murphy says, “My way into the story is Diana, an outsider trying to navigate a system of expectations.” He can relate to Diana and mused aloud what he might do in her situation: “Should you stay in this marriage for duty and your love for your kids even though your husband is in love with another woman?” His approach is also less about the chronology of events and more about what Diana was like as a real person. “How did it feel to be a like a butterfly caught in a net?” A horror story, indeed.

There is an unlimited supply of famous feuds from which to draw for future limited seasons. How’s that for another paradox: the unlimited limited series? But paradox and leaning in to what no one else seems to want—outlier, orphaned, fringe projects—is what keeps Murphy flying high. “You can’t win anymore by being mainstream, with something for everyone. Now everyone wants niche,” he asserts.

When visiting UCLA, Murphy encouraged the storytelling community to share personal stories and to stay courageous. “You’ve got to make some noise and you’ve got to be brave. I like weird. I like to make bold, bat-shit crazy stories that no one else will touch.” In his parting remarks, he brilliantly summed up his philosophy with a dash of inspiration: