Ryan Murphy‘s newest project will leave behind the golden-era clash of Truman Capote and his flock of high society swans for a more contemporary threat: the existential worry we all seem to feel that something in this world is very, very wrong.
According to a teaser that Murphy’s production company published to Instagram Friday, the previously-unannounced series, Grotesquerie, will center around frequent Murphy collaborator Niecy Nash-Betts. Nash-Betts, who took an outstanding supporting actress Emmy home last month for her work in Murphy’s Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, will be joined by another Murphy favorite: Courtney B. Vance, who also won an Emmy for his turn with the prolific creator (he played Johnny Cochran in The People v. O. J. Simpson: American Crime Story). British actress Lesley Manville (Princess Margaret in The Crown) rounds out the cast.
Murphy and his production company are no strangers to the horror genre, of course. Between the fantastical terrors of his lauded American Horror Story franchise on FX to the real-life scares in Netflix’s Monster: Dahmer, he’s explored our nation’s fears of serial killers, cults, and reality television.
His latest entry in the genre, which will premiere this fall, seems to suggest a look at the waves of mean world syndrome that have captured American society in recent years. “I don’t know when it started, I can’t put my finger on it, but it’s different now,” we first hear Nash-Betts say. “There’s been a shift, like something’s opening up in the world—a kind of hole that descends into a nothingness.”
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“What I saw today—they sent shrinks for everyone who worked this crime scene,” she continues. “You think, ‘Well hon, evil has always existed,’ and cite some statistic about how the world’s getting better, less murder, more help, less global horror, never been a better time to be alive, honey.”
“Come back,” she concludes. “It’s not getting better. And I keep needing to hear your answers, because something’s happening around us, and nobody sees but me.”
Will this new show basically be American Horror Story: How We All Feel After Looking At Nextdoor.com? It kind of sounds like it, but Murphy and FX are keeping mum for now, and didn’t respond to Vanity Fair’s request for more details.
Meanwhile, Murphy has another unsettling series in the offing: Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story, a retelling of the Lyle and Erik Menendez murder case. That one stars Javier Bardem, Chloë Sevigny, and Nicholas Alexander Chavez and Cooper Koch (as the titular brothers). That show is expected to debut on Netflix later this year.