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Ryan Murphy says he’s serious about American Horror Story: Election — kind of

Ryan Murphy says he’s serious about American Horror Story: Election — kind of

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‘Allegory’ is such a useful word

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Ryan Murphy, FX’s resident bad boy auteur, has sort of clarified a statement he made a few weeks ago about the upcoming season of American Horror Story. There will, in fact, be Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump characters on an election-themed season of the show. (Unless Murphy changes his mind again.)

He announced that the new season would tackle the 2016 election on Watch What Happens Live in mid-February, and initially said he didn’t know if the show would involve a Donald Trump character. A week later, he pivoted to say that the show would be only thematically related to the 2016 election: “The themes of American Horror Story have always been allegories … You will not see Trump and Clinton as characters on the show.” 

Today Murphy told E! News that the show will have Clinton and Trump characters, they just won’t be the main focus of the series, which will begin on Election Night and engage mostly with the aftermath of the 2016 election: “The election is allegory. It's our jumping off point. It is about the election we just went through and what happened on that night and the fallout of that night, which to many people, from all sides of the camps is a horror story.”

Murphy also said the American Horror Story team is halfway through writing the new season and that Clinton and Trump have not yet been cast. According to IMDb, the new season is still set to debut in September.

All this back-and-forth is typical for Murphy, who loves teasing audiences of the long-running anthology series. We probably won’t have any sort of concrete idea of what an American Horror Story: Election looks like until we see it.