That ‘Grotesquerie’ Twist Marks Something Ryan Murphy Has ‘Never’ Done Before

Note: This story contains spoilers from “Grotesquerie” Episode 7.

After the first six episodes, you would be forgiven for thinking “Grotesquerie” is just another Ryan Murphy show — a thriller filled with larger-than-life characters, brilliant actors and lovingly rendered horror. But like “American Horror Story,” “American Crime Story” and “Pose” before it, “Grotesquerie” marks a huge creative swing for the acclaimed showrunner. And it all comes down to Episode 7’s big twist.

“I’ve never done anything that worked out in advance, that meticulously designed,” series co-creator and executive producer Ryan Murphy told TheWrap. “It was so fun to do.”

It’s a fitting addition for a fall that marks Murphy’s official return to FX under its new parent company, Disney.

In its first six episodes, “Grotesquerie” tells the story of Lois Tryon (Niecy Nash-Betts), an alcoholic detective whose husband is trapped in a coma. When a serial killer with a knack for staging morbid, symbolism-filled crime scenes appears in her small town, Lois partners with Sister Megan Duval (Micaela Diamond), a journalist nun who’s obsessed with the morbid and occult. As Grotesquerie’s body count increases, the series takes on a murder-of-the-week procedural format. At least until Episode 7.

As Lois realized her religious partner was responsible for this wave of crimes, the audience stumbles upon its own shocking revelation. The trippy hellscape of the first six episodes and Grotesquerie’s string of murders never really existed. Instead, the series prior to this point was all a manifestation of a comatose Lois.

According to Murphy, this twist was “always” baked into the DNA of “Grotesquerie.” When Murphy first returned to Disney following the conclusion of his Netflix deal, the creator had several meetings with company heads about what he wanted to do next. That’s when the genesis for this twisting thriller emerged.

“I wanted to write something for myself, which I hadn’t really had the time or space to do in a long time because I’m so booked and blessed, as they say,” Murphy said. After FX gave the thumbs up, Murphy went off with his co-creators and writers Jon Robin Baitz and Joe Baken and created “Grotesquerie.”

“The industry tends to coalesce around the process that’s driven by the eccentricities of the business,” FX networks chairman John Landgraf, who has worked with Murphy for over 21 years, told TheWrap. “Ryan has always worked in a more impulsive, sort of manic creative fever.”

The network head likened Murphy’s process to the creation of George Frideric Handel’s “Messiah,” a musical composition that took only 24 days to craft. Landgraf noted that “a lot of the time” his projects with Murphy start with the executive producer just plunging in. “We don’t necessarily know exactly where it’s going. He always knows what the story is before he starts, but sometimes he hasn’t worked out all of the mechanics of the late middle of the story. But he’s also really good at working within a very rigorous, formal structure.”

That wasn’t the case with “Grotesquerie,” which emerged both fully formed and defiant of any expected structure. The drama was intentionally designed with the knowledge that Lois was in a coma. For example, the opening image of the series is of a curtain in Lois’ house that’s on fire, a detail that nods to the curtains surrounding her hospital bed.

“Grotesquerie” is filled with lovingly placed Easter eggs like these. The scene featuring Lesley Manville’s Nurse Redd eating cherries (not strawberries) represents Lois’ subconscious fear of blood clots. A scene that suddenly shows Lois being hit with white light is her ascending to a “higher plane.” Even Lois’ disorienting first meeting with Eddie (Travis Kelce) was intentionally created to make him appear as a literal guardian angel.

“I spent an hour on his lighting,” Murphy said, noting that the idyllic scene of Lois leaving in Eddie’s car was “a very strange choice.” “But every scene in [their meeting] was designed to feel like a dream.”

After “Grotesquerie” was written by Muphy, Baitz and Baken, Murphy wanted “visual showrunners” to interpret the show for him. That task fell to Alexis Martin Woodall, who is the president of Ryan Murphy Productions, and Max Winkler, who directed much of the season, including Episode 7.

One of the most challenging scenes to film in the episode was Lois’ confrontation of her partner, Sister Megan. As dream Lois accused the nun of grisly murder, the real Lois is starting to wake up. What follows is an unsettling kitchen fight between the two women that keeps pulling out to show more and more blackness.

Murphy praised Winkler for doing an “amazing job” on the episode and revealed the team had to build three different versions of the kitchen to get the fight right. “We wanted to have a perspective that you could only do with a Russian doll approach — big, medium, smaller — to get that idea,” Murphy said. “You don’t necessarily feel this, but I know as the filmmaker and Max knew this, what we were trying to visually tell people is you are moving through your unconscious back to the world.”

Murphy and Landgraf aren’t strangers to taking bold swings together. After Landgraf worried that there wasn’t enough of a story for Season 2 of “American Horror Story,” Murphy had the radical idea to burn down his Murder House and start from scratch, thus reigniting the trend of prestige anthology series in the United States. Similarly, “The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story” spearheaded a wave of scripted true crime anthology series. Then there was “Pose,” a series that revolutionized LGBTQ+ representation on TV and led to Billy Porter and Michaela Jaé Rodriguez making awards history.

“We’re on the edge of a cliff, and we’re going to jump,” Landgraf said. “That’s a lot of what it is to work with Ryan.”

“I feel like the world is a horror series. When I wrote [‘Grotesquerie’] with Robbie and Joe, we were just talking about our existential dread. So all of that stuff was always baked into the cake — global warming, Roe v. Wade taken away, COVID. Everything is in there,” Murphy said.

Though Murphy projects always come with some element of lock and key, “Grotesquerie” was on another level. “Nobody knew anything about [the scripts], and nobody in my company was really allowed to read them. It was very top secret with NDAs,” Murphy said, likening it to a Quentin Tarantino project, a director known for making people come into the office to read scripts.

As exciting as it was for Murphy to play with a different style of filmmaking that he described as more “guerrilla” compared to his typical “very big, very Baroque and very expensive” style, the secrecy around the “Grotesquerie” twist presented some problems.

“I’m so proud that nobody on the crew or no one who made it leaked the secret,” Murphy said. “That’s such a big thing sometimes. Every day, I was filled with dread: ‘Has it gotten out?’ And it never did. I think that’s a testament to the people who were making it who all really loved doing it.”

There was also the issue of the actors involved in the project, each of whom had to play two equally complicated yet connected roles in this wild world. Everyone involved in the series knew about the coma twist ahead of time and that they would be playing two versions of their character — the version Lois imagines in her coma and the actual character.

Then there was the promotion of the show. “We couldn’t market what the show was, so I think the audience has not entirely known what to make of it,” Landgraf admitted.

“A lot of people have said, ‘This is just a weak season of “American Horror Story.”‘ Well, no, it’s not ‘American Horror Story.’ You’re interpreting it through the prism of ‘American Horror Story,’ which is always completely straightforward and obvious in terms of what is fundamentally about,” Landgraf said. “This is much more existential horror, and it’s a totally different thing. I think that’s because people are not accustomed to a storyteller or an artist who has the latitude to shock or surprise them in a fundamental way.”

Rather than risk spoiling the twist, Landgraf and the FX team opted to market “Grotesquerie” in a straightforward way, trusting the success they had seen with Murphy in the past. This sense of artistic risk-taking also speaks to a central principle of Landgraf’s as a curator of television.

“I’ve been doing this for a long time. I just get bored by the dreary commerce of it all. I get bored by the lack of artistic ambition or the lack of courage to try new things,” Landgraf said. “One of the reasons I came to FX in the first place is because I watched ‘Nip/Tuck’ and I found it so innovative and so different than anything I’ve ever seen. I was like, ‘I want to do that.'”

It’s rare to see a relationship between a showrunner and a network head that’s as respectful, collaborative and creatively enriching as the one between Murphy and Landgraf. Repeatedly throughout the interview, each man would answer questions in a way that heaped praise on the other.

During a particularly insightful glimpse into their working relationship, Landgraf likened the “Grotesquerie” to “The Second Coming,” a poem by William Butler Yeats that uses imagery evocative of the Apocalypse and the Second Coming of Christ to describe Europe after World War I. “There are times when the center of a civilization feels like it’s giving way and everything is spinning apart,” Landgraf said. “[Ryan] captured that feeling, and it feels like a fever dream. It feels surreal.”

“It’s so spooky that you say this because — John and I have never talked about this — when I was working on it and designing the look of it, Joni Mitchell did a song with those lyrics. I would play that song over and over,” Murphy said. “It was that idea that John just said — that one line, ‘The center cannot hold.'”

It’s true that throughout Murhpy’s Netflix deal, he never left FX. During that time, the executive producer continued to make new seasons of ongoing shows like “American Horror Story,” “American Crime Story” and “Pose.” He even launched several new shows around his tentpole property, including “American Horror Stories,” “American Sports Story” and the upcoming “American Love Story.” But it was his relationships with his longtime champion Dana Walden, co-chairman of Disney Entertainment, and Landgraf who convinced him to officially return.

“I’m somebody in the world who feels very misunderstood, and I have since birth. That’s my cross to bear. I never feel misunderstood with John ever. That’s a very safe, wonderful place to land as an artist and a person,” Murphy said. “It is a rarity, and I’m very appreciative of that in my life.”

Now that Murphy is back and under the Disney umbrella, he’s ready to explore all the components the company has to offer. That includes continuing to develop and work on shows for FX, which he described as the “Tiffany” of the corporation’s TV verticals. That will include the upcoming Evan Peters, Anthony Ramos, Jeremy Pope and Ashton Kutcher drama “The Beauty,” which Murphy starts on in December. It also means embracing his network roots with ABC series like “9-1-1” and “Doctor Odyssey” and developing new projects for Hulu.

“I just started the Glenn Close, Kim Kardashian, Sarah Paulson, Niecy Nash-Betts, Naomi Watts show for Hulu. That’s a very different ecosystem, but it’s kind of thrilling that I get to do all that,” Murphy said.

As for “Grotesquerie,” both Murphy and Landgraf assured TheWrap that the twists won’t end with Episode 7. “This is actually like a Russian nesting doll. It has multiple different levels of meaning past the first reveal,” Landgraf teased. “It hasn’t fully established itself as the series it wants to be until the until the end of the 10th episode.”

“Grotesquerie” airs new episodes Wednesdays on FX and streams the next day on Hulu.

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