Queer Quality? Reception, Creative Agency, and Excess in the Soundtracks of Ryan Murphy’s Horror Television

Superstar writer-producer-director-showrunner Ryan Murphy is both emblematic and at the margins of trends within the production and reception of contemporary television. With a distinctiveness of style and consistency of theme across multiple shows and formats, Murphy’s work bears many hallmarks of the auteur—a common theme in television criticism, which often applies (not unproblematic) cinematic models to the small screen as markers of excellence. However, identification of Murphy as auteur is almost always accompanied by unease about the quality and/or value of his productions, which are both celebrated and censured for their extravagance; guilty pleasures that sit easily with the concept of event TV, but less comfortably within discourse around high-end, cerebral, “art” television. Murphy’s “excesses”—visual sumptuousness; sonic saturation; outlandish plots; exaggerated characterization; liberal use of sex and violence; and recycling of stars across roles and series—are explicitly coded as queer, a positioning amplified by Murphy’s own queer celebrity, his frequent foregrounding of narratives of acceptance, and increasingly inclusive casting choices. Again, this coding is both positive and negative. Whilst celebrating diversity, subjectivity, and authorial creativity, it also aligns with a long history of marginalization through the positioning of queerness as camp, theatrical, superficial … as just too much.

Asking “how much is too much?”, this chapter examines excess in the soundtracks of Murphy’s horror television, and their uneasy position within the discourse of quality television. As a genre marked by boundary-crossing and the spectacular, horror is often both visually and sonically extreme, and Murphy’s musical collaborators work both within and outside expectations of both the horror soundtrack and the ideals of cohesion, authorial agency, and “good taste” that commonly underpin notions of artistry and value. The soundtracks of series including American Horror Story (FX, 2011–), Scream Queens (2015–16), Ratched (Netflix, 2020), and Dahmer—Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story (Netflix, 2022) are both dense and diverse, grabbing attention with a range of strategies that include classic horror tropes, pre-existing tracks, intensely-rendered pastiche cues, musical moments, and crossover appearances by musical stars. They demonstrate not only the “peakness” of Murphy’s sonic approach, but also the ways in which this might challenge developing models of quality in television sound and music.