American Horror Story: NYC is the eleventh season of American Horror Story, airing on FX in 2022.
The year is 1981. Something is killing gay men in New York City amid a similar phenomenon of deer out on Fire Island. On the former front, Det. Patrick Reed (Russell Tovey) is trying to investigate, but faces indifference from his fellow officers and hostility from the gay community. Desperate for leads, he enlists the help of his boyfriend, reporter Gino Barelli (Joe Mantello), who's tired of seeing his community getting preyed upon. On the latter front, Dr. Hannah Wells (Billie Lourd) manages to organize a deer cull, but soon discovers that the disease that is killing the deer has spread to humans.
Also starring in NYC are series newbies Russell Tovey, Joe Mantello, Charlie Carver and Kal Penn, while returning cast members include Billie Lourd, Denis O'Hare, Leslie Grossman, Isaac Cole Powell, Sandra Bernhard, Rebecca Dayan, Patti LuPone, and Zachary Quinto, marking his first role in the franchise since American Horror Story: Asylum a decade earlier.
American Horror Story: NYC contains examples of:
- The '80s: Most of the season is set in 1981, right before the early onset of the HIV/AIDS crisis. The finale jumps to 1987, then continues on into the early 90s as the AIDS crisis gets bigger and bigger.
- Allegorical Character: Rather than a conventional serial killer, Big Daddy ends up being a metaphor for the oncoming AIDS crisis and how it's about to devastate the gay community across America.
- Anyone Can Die: Over half the main cast dies, often on-camera and horribly.
- The Artifact: The only overt, inexplicable supernatural element in the story is a tarot card reading that flips nothing but Death cards, whereas most of the show's stories have magic and monsters as primary themes.
- Artistic License – Biology: Plenty in how AIDS is shown, such as:
- Red blood cells are not targeted by HIV nor are they immune cells, so several characters having a low red blood cell count doesn't suggest they have AIDS, same goes for platelets later on.
- Cryptosporidium is not an amoeba.
- Dr. Hannah Wells dying of AIDS little after contracting it via insemination with Adam's sperm doesn't fit the usual timeline of AIDS taking years to develop.
- Pneumocystis being a fungus is accurate but at the time of the story it was mistaken for a protozoa.
- Call-Back: To the previous season's first part. Once again, deers are accused of transmitting Lyme disease (via ticks), which is Dr. Hannah Wells's first hypothesis for the sickness that several characters have, revealed in the finale to be AIDS and have nothing to do with deers as Hannah states in her tapes.
- Cast Full of Gay: Only three of the principle cast are not confirmed gay: Barbara, Hannah, and Kathy.
- Downer Ending: Most of the principal characters are dead by the end of the season, predominantly from AIDS. The final shot of the finale is Adam, who has HIV, breaking down as he prepares to give the eulogy at Gino's funeral. About the only bittersweet thing about it is that it's heavily implied that Adam's actions managed to help spread awareness and possibly save some lives early on in the epidemic.
- Freeze-Frame Bonus: Although the camera holds on the scattered tarot card deck on the floor after the reading where every card Fran draws is Death, you need to freeze frame it to realize what the point is: it's just a normal deck with the usual distribution of cards.
- Incurable Cough of Death:
- An offscreen variant. Dr. Wells is heard coughing in her recorded notes near the end of the season. Her final recording has her cough so hard that she ends up collapsing in her lab.
- Also onscreen: Theo is seen coughing in Fire Island, he is dead by the end of the episode
- Irony: Adam says that he never got an STD. Of course he has AIDS but doesn't know it yet.
- Lover and Beloved:
- Patrick and Gino seem to have this dynamic, with Gino at one point teasing Pat about how little he knows about the history of their community.
- Sam and Theo definitely have this dynamic, with Sam being the older, wealthier patron to the relatively young Theo.
- Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: The Sentinel. Not a lot of evidence on the "magic" side, but if it had actually worked it would have been far from the craziest thing to happen on this show.
- No Celebrities Were Harmed
- Hans Henkes, a rather esoteric performer, is a fictionalized version of Klaus Nomi.
- Theo is a fictionalized version of Robert Mapplethorpe, a New York-based photographer known for both his erotic photographs of men and thoughtful and delicate photographs of flowers.
- Gino Barelli bears a strong resemblance to playwright Larry Kramer; the season draws heavily from Kramer's The Normal Heart, which Ryan Murphy had previously adapted in 2014, featuring Gino's actor Joe Mantello in a supporting role (he had also played Kramer's Author Avatar Ned Weeks on stage in 2010).
- Promotion to Opening Titles: Sandra Bernhard and Patti LuPone, compared to their respective previous appearances in Apocalypse and Coven.
- Secretly Dying: The finale reveals that pretty much every significant character in the story has been infected with HIV, including poor Dr. Wells, who became infected when she inseminated herself with Adam's sperm, not realizing that he was already carrying the virus. By the finale, those who weren't already killed have progressed to AIDS, which slowly kills them off one by one, until only Adam is left.
- Tone Shift: NYC is probably the most "serious" season of the entire franchise, eschewing the camp that usually defines it in favor of a more grounded detective story that's something of a cross between Cruising and The Normal Heart.
- Tragic AIDS Story: The entire narrative is set in New York City at the dawn of the HIV/AIDS crisis as people are getting infected. By the end of the season, almost all of the major characters who survived Mr. Whitely's murder spree get AIDS, and many are shown to have either died of it, are implied to have died, or are living with it.
- Unwitting Instigator of Doom: Adam who gives Hannah AIDS via turkey baster insemination.
- Vacation Episode: The entirety of "Fire Island" is set exactly where you think it is.
- We ARE Struggling Together: There is shown to be a clear divide in priorities between gay men and lesbians, as exemplified by Gino and Fran's fights over what the gay press should be focusing on. Gino, a gay man, has been using the paper to sound the alarm on predators in the clubs and homophobes in the NYPD. Fran, a lesbian, thinks Gino should use the paper to raise more awareness about the stalling of the Equal Rights Amendment and sexism in the workplace.
- Whole-Plot Reference: The season largely plays homage to both Cruising (the pursuit of a serial killer targeting gay men) and The Normal Heart (a depiction of the early days of the HIV/AIDS epidemic).
