'Grotesquerie' Review: Niecy Nash Shines Through the Moral Murk ...

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Branding is central to Ryan Murphy’s TV empire, but the brand names themselves can often feel a little fungible.

Take Murphy’s output in this current two-week period: FX’s American Sports Story: Aaron Hernandez absolutely could have been renamed Hernandez: Monster — The Aaron Hernandez Story. Netflix’s Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story probably could have been Feud: The Menendez Family. I haven’t seen ABC’s Doctor Odyssey, but all promotion indicates that it’s 9-1-1: Love Boat.

On that shifting scale, FX’s Grotesquerie could easily have had the American Horror Story name appended in front of it. With hints of Cult, Coven and Asylum immediately evident, it looks to take almost an everything bagel approach to the signatures of that series.

After only two episodes (none were made available for critics ahead of the premiere), it’s too early to tell if that description will prove reductive, even given how expansive the American Horror Story franchise has become. While the series is off to a fittingly audacious yet wildly over-familiar start, neither the titles Grotesquerie nor American Horror Story: Grotesquerie would truly capture the best reason to check it out — namely, the absolute pleasure of watching Niecy Nash front and center as the undisputed star of what could be her very own branded property within the Murphy realm. The co-creator has done well by Nash in the past, setting her up for a thoroughly deserved Emmy win for the Dahmer thing. But this latest endeavor could develop into one of her best roles.

Nash plays Lois Tryon, a weary police detective nearing the end of a decorated career in a small town where none of the electricity works and it always seems to be raining. Lois, who keeps a carefully tabulated record of all the heinous crimes she’s solved over the years, has an extensive drinking problem. She’s also struggling to hold together the last vestiges of a family that includes daughter Merritt (Raven Goodwin), brilliant at puzzles and entirely uninterested in adjusting her eating habits for her health, and husband Marshall (Courtney B. Vance), a former philosophy professor now hospitalized in a coma.

As the narrative begins, Lois is called in on the horrifying quintuple homicide of a family butchered in ritualized and exotically culinary fashion. The case is like nothing Lois or her colleagues have ever encountered, but that won’t be true for long. Over the next two chapters, Lois will have to report to at least three more murderous tableaux, each more gruesome and religiously specific than the last.

It’s the latter element that attracts the attention of Sister Megan (Micaela Diamond), a journalistically inclined nun who believes the killings are an interconnected part of something borderline apocalyptic that Lois cannot begin to comprehend.

Created by Murphy, Jon Robin Baitz and Joe Baken, Grotesquerie plays like CBS/Paramount+’s Evil meets Seven — a gloomy fin de siècle commentary on a society in disarray, made all the more ominous because no century is coming to an end. We’re just stuck here. Between rampant homelessness, a global pandemic and a crisis of spiritual faith so dire that even churches are resorting to clickbait journalism to get people in the pews, the world has simply ceased to make sense. This causes serious problems for Lois, who prides herself on meticulous logic. But it represents an opportunity for Sister Megan, who may not understand what’s happening but is equipped with the necessary Biblical vernacular to speculate.

As directed in opening installments by Max Winkler, Grotesquerie is a dour and depressing place in which everybody seems to be wading in the same muck. That includes salacious Nurse Redd (Lesley Manville), who tenders care to Lois’ husband that’s either overtly perverse or simply appears to be perverse through Lois’ cynical glasses. Even Sister Megan’s boss Father Charlie (Nicholas Alexander Chavez) is a man of true crime as much as he is a self-flagellating man of God.

“I tell myself that I only watch this stuff out of concern for the victims, sympathy,” Father Charlie professes. “But the truth is, these crime shows, podcasts, I have a bit of a morbid fascination.”

In this manner, Father Charlie speaks as much for the Ryan Murphy TV empire as for the audience, which may want to be above this malaise but invariably ends up wallowing in it.

All of that might make Grotesquerie sound like a televised dirge, but it’s not. Or at least not always. Sure, Baitz loves a Bible-spiked monologue on the shifting nature of good and evil. But framed in a different way, this drama could be described as a rather wacky and wild buddy cop show in which the crime-fighting partners are an alcoholic detective and an obscenity-spewing nun — right down to an in-series reference to Cagney and Lacey.

It’s a show in which a nun and a priest sit in a diner chowing down on hamburgers and debating their favorite serial killers (Father Charlie’s a big fan of Ed Gein, who not-even-vaguely-coincidentally will be the focus of the next Monster season on Netflix). It’s so self-consciously somber that the dinginess does not read as a parody exactly, but definitely as a fetish or a form of kink. It’s like a version of True Detective willing to accept its place as more pulp than prestige.

It gets off on being glum — Carolina Costa’s cinematography makes the moral miasma concrete, daring us to desperately seek out the shafts of light or brief bursts of levity — yet doesn’t feel monotonous, in large part because Nash’s take-no-shit attitude cuts right through. Lois is, by design, the kind of archetypal hard-boiled, hard-drinking, borderline nihilistic investigator that genre pieces have traditionally restricted to middle-aged white men. Nash makes the trope fresh again, because she couldn’t play a flat archetype if she tried.

Her flashbacks with Vance convey in minutes the credibility of a multi-decade relationship drained of all current affection, but rich in accumulated memories. Her scenes with the excellent Goodwin balance affection and total resignation beautifully. And watching Nash and Manville brawl using only lacerating words is such a naturally campy spectacle that it’s a wonder we haven’t gotten an entire American Horror Story season dedicated to it previously. After this, we surely will.

In her first extended TV role, Broadway star Diamond is an immediately likable breakout. She reminds you of other offbeat and kooky religious characters, but she never settles in as just one form of weird. She’s especially good opposite Chavez, who exhibits much more restraint over his boundless charisma than his turn as Lyle Menendez in Monsters asked of him. Though as soon as Father Charlie got to masturbating and then mortification of the flesh, he became the sort of debauched man of the cloth I’ve seen too many times to find even remotely shocking.

Unfortunately, there’s a lot of that familiarity in the early installments of Grotesquerie. For all that the title and cutaways to vomiting cops want to suggest something operatic and, well, grotesque beyond comprehension, what we finally get here isn’t quite that. While definitely more disturbing than your average serial killer set-up 300-ish episodes into Criminal Minds, it’s less inspired and outré than the corpse-icle from True Detective: Night Country.

Maybe things will get truly warped once Travis Kelce appears? Not much point in making a big thing about casting the football star if you aren’t going to do something messed up with him. For now, though, Nash and company offer reasons to stick with Grotesquerie for at least a few weeks more.