"Grotesquerie" and the Peril of the Plot Twist

The Ryan Murphy series, which features a stunning plot twist in its seventh episode, is a cautionary tale about the danger of narrative missteps and unearned twists.

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Grotesquerie is, I think it’s safe to say, one of the strangest shows that has yet to emerge from the mind of Ryan Murphy. I’ve come to think of it as somehow both even more deranged than American Horror Story and yet also somehow more restrained than its predecessor. True, there were some very fucked up moments–particularly those involving the various murders and some provocative religious imagery–but Niecy Nash-Betts was so damn compelling and so riveting to watch that somehow she managed to ground most of the bat-shittery in some level of believability. 

Nash-Betts’ Lois Tryon is a hard-bitten, hard-drinking detective who rather feels like she came straight out of a pulp novel of the 1940s (if the novels by Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain, Dashiel Hammett and the like ever featured Black female protagonists). Like her predecessors in the genre, Lois finds herself steadily drawn into a dark and dangerous world, one in which the rules of everyday life are suspended or flaunted in bizarre ways. While she may be a phenomenal detective, she’s also a hopeless alcoholic, and her addiction has wreaked havoc with her personal life. 

The series’ first seven episodes did a remarkably effective job of balancing Nash-Betts’ grounded performance with the madness unfolding around her. I mean, this is part of the bargain that you make with yourself when you tune in to something that’s been made by Ryan Murphy. You’ll see a lot of great performances–some of them the best of an actors’ career–but you’ll also just have to turn your brain off and accept that narrative coherence has never been Murphy’s strong suit. 

This is particularly true when it comes to a show like Grotesquerie. Say what you will about Murphy, but he is at least ambitious when it comes to the issues that he wants to address, and this series is no exception. In just seven episodes we’re treated to a potpourri of themes, ranging from family dysfunction and abuse and fat shaming to the complex and fraught relationship between violence, sexual desire, and religious faith. There are bad mothers and bad fathers and adultery, and Lesley Manville gives some terrifically bizarre line readings. It’s all heady stuff and, though I wasn’t sure it would all pay off or would end up going somewhere interesting, I was at least happy to go along for the ride. 

And then along came episode seven.

There was a part of me that knew that something was going to happen that would turn our entire understanding of this show on its head, and so it proved to be. Whereas up until now we’ve been led to think that it was Marshall who was in a coma just waiting for the plug to be pulled, instead it's really been Lois all along. Moreover, she is the one who committed adultery, with their son-in-law (played by a very underwhelming Travis Kelce). Even though I suspected this was where everything was going once the plot went off the rails in the first part of the episode, this didn’t keep me from emitting a very loud groan.

Look. I’m not averse to a plot twist, so long as it actually feels earned and doesn’t come out of nowhere. I mean,I guess there were signs of where this was all going scattered throughout the first several episodes, particularly when one accounts for just how bizarre some of the storylines were. There were indeed times when I was starting to think that the entire show was going to operate on some kind of dream logic, but it still feels so cheap and soap operaish to have this all come down to an extended dream sequence (there’s nothing wrong with soap opera plots, of course, but they work best within the genre itself rather than in a show that bills itself as something else). To put it bluntly, this isn’t the show I signed up for.

Just as importantly, the revelation that this is all a dream undercuts all of the things that we’ve been led to believe about Lois as a character. Whereas before we were asked to regard Lois through the prism of the hard-bitten and cynical detective, now she’s been reduced to someone whose entire story is nothing more than a coma-dream. Not to put too fine a point on it, but it almost makes her pathetic, and that’s really a shame, considering how much work Niecy Nash-Betts put into making Lois a deeply flawed but nevertheless powerful figure. 

I suppose it’s still possible that Grotesquerie could manage to pull this off. As other reviewers have noted, however, Murphy doesn’t exactly have the best track record when it comes to making sure that a series sticks the landing. There’s still time for Lois, and the rest of us, to figure out just what the hell has been happening, but I struggle to see how it’s ever going to regain narrative ground now that it’s clear the central mystery has presumably been a red herring all along. 

The unfortunate and ill-timed twist aligns Grotesquerie with another recent neo-noir that also thought it was being clever by pulling the rug out from beneath viewers’ feet: Apple TV+’s Sugar, which starred Colin Farrell as a private investigator with a mysterious and possibly shady past. Lo and behold, he’s not who we think he is, and just past the halfway point in the series we realize that he’s actually an alien. I’ll be honest: I stopped watching after that point and never returned. There are just some plot twists that are so egregious, and so clumsily handled, that they ruin whatever came before and what will come after. As with Grotesquerie, this was a plot twist that I thought was a possibility, even as my rational mind told me that surely no series would go in that direction. Sometimes, I really would like to be wrong.

My personal suspicion is that Grotesquerie, like Sugar, will continue to stumble along, not quite sure what to do now that it’s reset the table. I have yet to watch this week’s episode, and so as I write this I have no idea whether the series has managed to at least do something interesting with the revelation. To be honest, my enthusiasm for this outing is significantly dimmed now. It’s really only the fact that I’m a completionist, in combination with my life of Niecy Nash-Bates, that will keep me coming back for more punishment. 

Ryan Murphy: I wish I knew how to quit you.