10 TV Shows Literally One Step From Perfection

Look, American Horror Story is as famous for its flaws as anything it gets right. Like so many Ryan Murphy productions it seems as likely to stumble into gold as something less savoury, and most seasons veer massively in quality between episodes and sometimes even within scenes.

Which makes it all the more surprising that the show managed to create a superb, timely, cutting, and terrifying satire of the 2016 election only a year after the fact. Focusing less on the actual candidates and their campaigns in favour of savagely satirizing liberal feminism and reactionary conservativism, the show also benefited from the scariest antagonist in years in the form of Kai Anderson.

A career best turn from series regular Evan Peters, Anderson comes to represent the danger of fear mongering and small-minded groupthink without ever lurching into easy parody. His rise is easy to understand and it’s unsettling to watch, helpless, as he appeals to people’s real fears to gain further power and influence.

Sounds pretty great, right?

About the only way you could mess up such a subtle and effective horror satire would be to, say, turn your heroine into a facsimile of infamously divisive public figure Hilary Clinton and use the closing minutes as a corny rerun of election night, complete with mortifying “nasty woman” namecheck?

So close. So close, and always so, so far.