American Horror Story: 10 Things Freak Show Must Do Better Than Its Predecessors

3. Don't Exploit For The Sake Of A Storyline

One of the concerns levelled at American Horror Story is that it can come across as exploitative. In Coven, these complaints mostly pointed at the black/white divide and war between the two types of witches, and that isn't even to start on the slavery issues. Naturally with the forthcoming season being subtitled Freak Show there is some potential concern that it could exploit the disabilities of background actors. But this need not be the case. For example, despite the look of Pepper in Asylum (as seen above), it was a look developed entirely via make up. This shows a level of creativity inherent in the production team that should mean that these concerns can be put to rest. The easiest comparison has to be to HBO's Carnivàle €“ despite certain characters being recruited for their look, others were enhanced using makeup. For example, the conjoined twins were played by the non-conjoined Steben Twins, and the Gecko's scaly skin was simply make-up applied to the non-scaly John Fleck. None of these are particular challenges for a decent television make-up department, and there must be plenty of film quality make-up artists who would want to take up the challenge. Mind you, this didn't stop certain people from thinking that Pepper really looked like that, and it won't stop this mistake (and the ensuing accusation of exploitation) being directed towards AHS in the future.