I Like to Watch

by Emily Nussbaum

  When Murphy entered the industry, he sometimes struck his peers as an aloof, prickly figure; he has deep wounds from those years, although he admits that he contributed to this reputation. Nonetheless, Murphy has moved steadily from the margins to television’s center. He changed; the industry changed; he changed the industry. In February, Murphy rose even higher, signing the largest deal in television history: a three-hundred-million-dollar, five-year contract with Netflix. For Murphy, it was a moment of both triumph and tension. You can’t be the underdog when you’re the most powerful man in TV.

  On that sunny afternoon in South Beach, however, Murphy was still comfortably ensconced in a twelve-year deal with Fox Studios. On FX, which is owned by Fox, he had three anthology series: American Horror Story; American Crime Story, for which he was filming Versace, writing Katrina, and planning a season based on the Monica Lewinsky scandal; and Feud, whose first season starred Susan Sarandon as Bette Davis and Jessica Lange as Joan Crawford.

  For Fox, he was developing 9-1-1, a procedural about first responders. He had announced two shows for Netflix: Ratched, a nurse’s-eye view of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, starring Sarah Paulson; and The Politician, a satirical drama starring Ben Platt. Glenn Close was trying to talk him into directing her in a movie version of the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical Sunset Boulevard. Murphy was writing a book called Ladies, about female icons. He had launched Half, a foundation dedicated to diversity in directing, and had committed to hiring half of his directors from underrepresented groups. And, he told me, there was something new: a series for FX called Pose, a dance-filled show set in the 1980s.

  It was no mystery which character in his current series Murphy most identified with: Gianni Versace himself. Versace was a commercially minded artist whose brash inventions were dismissed by know-nothings as tacky, and whose openness about his sexuality threatened his ascent in a homophobic era. Versace, too, was a baroque maximalist, Murphy told me, who built his reputation through fervid workaholism—an insistence that his vision be seen and understood. “He was punished and he struggled,” Murphy said, then spoke in Versace’s voice: “Why aren’t I loved for my excess? Why don’t they see something valid in that?”

  Shortly before I left Miami, Murphy and I drank rosé at a South Beach restaurant. “A double pour,” he told the waiter. “It’s Friday.” We talked about Pose, which is set in the drag ballroom scene in New York during the Reagan era and the AIDS crisis. Many people knew of this world through Jennie Livingston’s 1990 documentary, Paris Is Burning, or Madonna’s “Vogue” video. In 2015, Murphy approached Miramax, the distributor of Paris, and bought an eighteen-month option; he met with Livingston, who introduced him to the surviving subjects of her movie and, later, recommended a variety of queer consultants. Murphy initially intended to base characters on the people in the documentary: queer performers of color who competed for trophies in such categories as Executive Realness. These drag queens, trans dancers, and female impersonators lived in sorority-like groups that had names like the House of Xtravaganza and were overseen by older “mothers”—a family for people who often had been rejected by the ones they were born into.

  In 2016, an independent producer tipped Murphy off to a similar project. Steven Canals, a thirty-six-year-old Afro-Latino queer screenwriter from the Bronx, had written Pose—a fictional pilot set in the eighties ballroom world, featuring a gay and trans ensemble. Nobody in Hollywood was biting. Murphy attached his name and FX signed on. Murphy, Canals, and Murphy’s main creative partner, Brad Falchuk, reworked the pilot and added a new character: Donald Trump, in his Master of the Universe days. Murphy was committed to getting Pose on the air that summer. He planned to create a writers’ room filled with trans people, many of them newcomers to TV.

  I told Murphy that the series sounded like a cool risk. “It’s not a risk at all,” he said, frowning. “I know instantly that it’s a hit.” He explained, “There’s something for everybody—and there’s something to offend everybody. That’s what a hit is.” He foresaw a broad demographic: “You, me, the young people who love nostalgia, the fourteen-year-old girl who is watching Tom Holland dress in drag and dance to Rihanna.”

  Murphy gave me a copy of the reworked pilot, and on my way to the airport he texted, “On a scale of 1 to 10—10 being masterpiece, 1 being awful—what do u give pose?” When I tried to change the subject, to maintain journalistic distance, he texted back, “Ha!” And then: “I know one day you will tell me.” And then: “I am guessing a 9.” And then: “With the potential for a 10!”

  Murphy has long been a connoisseur of extremes and hyperbole, games and theatricality. He rates everything he sees and revels in institutions that do the same—the Oscars are a kind of religion for him. In Miami, at dinner with the Katrina and Versace writers, he played a high-stakes game in which he was forced to immediately choose one person in his circle over another; he demurred only when the choice was between Jessica Lange and Sarah Paulson. His go-to question is “Is it a hit or a flop?,” and he asked it about every show that came up in conversation as I observed him giving shape to Pose, from scouting locations to editing dance footage. (He has other stock phrases. “What’s the scoop?” is how he begins writers’ meetings. “Energy begets energy” explains his impulse to add new projects. “That’s interesting” sometimes indicates “That’s worth noticing” but just as often means “That’s infuriating.”)

  Murphy’s first show, Popular, which debuted in 1999, was, in fact, something of a flop, lasting only two seasons on the teen channel The WB. It is such a painful memory for Murphy that, last year, when the Producers Guild of America honored him with its Norman Lear Achievement Award, he didn’t include the show on the placard listing his productions. Like Glee, Popular was a high school comedy. It featured rat-a-tat dialogue (“Shut your dirty whore mouth, player player!”) and a Gwyneth Paltrow–obsessed cheerleader with webbed toes. It baffled the network, which wanted something closer to Dawson’s Creek.

  Murphy recalls a fusillade of homophobic notes: A fur coat made by anally electrocuting chinchillas was deemed “too gay,” and the producers were okay with the show’s few homosexual characters only if they suffered. “I don’t think they understood who they had on their hands,” the actress Leslie Grossman, who played the web-toed Mary Cherry, recalls. She fondly remembers Popular as “a show by gay men in their thirties for gay men in their thirties.” In one meeting, a WB executive imitated Murphy, flopping his wrists and adopting a fey voice. (Both hurtful and inaccurate, Murphy pointed out: He inherited a low, rumbling voice from his father.) The final season of Popular included an insubordinate homage to What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?

  In 2003, on the more welcoming network FX, Murphy had his first hit: Nip/Tuck, a twisted plastic-surgery medical procedural spiked with satire about a looks-obsessed culture. He pitched the show, about a competitive friendship between two Miami doctors, as a tribute, in part, to one of his childhood obsessions: the Mike Nichols film Carnal Knowledge, which he saw as a love story about two straight men. “Nobody ever got the connection,” he told me. “I loved that movie ten times more than The Graduate.” The catchphrase of Nip/Tuck was “Tell me what you don’t like about yourself.” Even at FX, whose president, John Landgraf, was eager to nurture auteurs, Murphy fought with his bosses constantly. He spent hours debating Landgraf about the limits of good taste (understandably—one Nip/Tuck plot was about a yogi demanding a penis reduction because he couldn’t stop fellating himself). Nip/Tuck got terrific ratings, but Murphy bridled when some viewers saw him as glamorizing plastic surgery. He believed that he was sending a feminist message by “hiding the vegetables in the cotton candy,” he told me.

  In 2008, toward the end of Nip/Tuck’s run, Murphy filmed a labor of love—Pretty/Handsome, a pilot about a closeted trans gynecologist, played by Joseph Fiennes, who lives in Darien, Connecticut, with his wife and kids. This was six years before Transpare
nt, long before trans activism became a mainstream cultural force. In the pilot, Fiennes treats a married couple: a trans man, played by Dot-Marie Jones, and a trans woman, played by Alexandra Billings, who later appeared on Transparent. The pilot was kinky and original, laced with the dark humor of Nip/Tuck but humanistic beneath its arch surfaces. FX passed. Murphy didn’t speak to Landgraf for ten months.

  Yet this failure was soon followed by the Fox series Glee, which, in 2009, transformed Murphy into not merely a showrunner but a full-on celebrity. The show was a high school musical that put queer kids, weird girls, and underdogs in the lead roles. Its musical sequences—football players, in tights, dancing to Beyoncé—became iconic. Glee had the surreal verve of Popular, rendered more heartfelt, a beacon to oddballs everywhere. Both Nip/Tuck and Glee ran for multiple seasons, and had intense fan bases, but they also flew off the rails: Nip/Tuck became a Grand Guignol in its twists; Glee got preachy and self-indulgent. As Brad Falchuk told me, “We do such amazing Seasons 1 and 2. It’s Season 3 that terrifies me.”

  In 2011, Murphy, feeling constrained by the teen-beat rhythms of Glee, hit on a radical scheme for a new show. Called American Horror Story, it would be set in a haunted house in L.A.; the plot would resolve after one season, with all the characters dead, then reboot, recasting many of the actors in new roles. Intuitively, he’d solved the structural problem that had plagued even his strongest creations. Now each story could end—even unhappily. The first season, known as Murder House, was defiantly strange, with a miserable married couple, a black-leather-suited gimp, Jessica Lange as a glamorous mother of monsters, and a ghostly maid who switched between looking like a young tramp and an old crone. It evoked Rosemary’s Baby and other social-commentary horror movies of the sixties. It also revived Lange’s career—and, over time, Murphy built a repertory company of stars, many of them older women, such as Kathy Bates and Angela Bassett, or openly gay performers like Zachary Quinto and Sarah Paulson.

  But critics, particularly online, treated Murder House as outré junk. (The Guardian called it “the Marmite of TV shows”—the kind of thing you either loved or loathed.) When the series was being pitched, its slogan was “the House always wins,” but, rather than stick with the haunted-house concept, Murphy and his partners, Falchuk and Minear, rebooted the setting as well. Season 2, Asylum, was set in a mid-century mental hospital run by nuns. It was a caustic masterwork, a pulp manifesto denouncing the institutional torture of sexual minorities by the government, the Church, and the medical establishment. The show featured a whip-wielding nun, carnival pinheads, a closeted-lesbian investigative journalist, and a serial killer with Holocaust lampshades. It got a better reception than Murder House, but was still treated as a curiosity, particularly by viewers who expected a purer camp experience. In the Times, Mike Hale complained, “Asylum would be better off if Briarcliff Manor had more furniture for [the actors] to chew.”

  In 2014, FX aired an anthology show by Noah Hawley, Fargo, a reinterpretation of the Coen brothers’ movie. The first season was beautiful but empty, as violent as American Horror Story but more misogynist. Yet Fargo was anointed the best show of the year—and, on occasion, celebrated in tones suggesting that it had revived the anthology model. A 2015 Wall Street Journal article on the trend mentions Murphy’s work only in passing, arguing that the “format’s broader promise paid off” with Fargo and HBO’s True Detective. Murphy repeatedly suffered such slights in his career, as his work was eclipsed by that of people he dismisses as “dowdy, middle-aged, white-male showrunners writing about dowdy, middle-aged, white-male antiheroes.” He loved The Sopranos, but its progeny drove him nuts. Those shows were seen as weighty, worldly, universal. His were regarded as frivolous diversions.

  Murphy’s productivity only grew in response, in a kind of defiant inventiveness. He often says that his drive stems from the AIDS era. “I always thought I would die from sex,” he told me. “So I had to get more done.” But that doesn’t really account for his workaholism; there are plenty of fifty-three-year-old gay men of my acquaintance who didn’t become charismatic showrunners working seven days a week. Murphy is unapologetically mass-market: He has no interest in doing independent films that attract small audiences. He’s proud never to have made, as he puts it, “the long Sominex hour that ends in gray and a fadeout.” For Murphy, what marks his work is the desire to pull outsider characters in, to make a gay kid or a middle-aged woman a protagonist, not a sidekick. But his biggest strength is his strangeness, his allergy to the dully inspiring, and his native attraction to the angriest characters—a quality he traces to “the Velvet Rage,” referring to the title of a 2005 book about the fury gay men feel in a straight world. Although Murphy’s work shares some parallels, in its rude humor and sexual candor, with that of modern female showrunners like Shonda Rhimes and Jill Soloway, he’s not especially close to them. (Murphy feels that they’ve snubbed him on the occasions when they’ve met.) His favorite directors are Steven Spielberg, David Fincher, Hal Ashby, and Mike Nichols. Fincher is his role model, he says, for his darkness and control, and for the fact that he “doesn’t give a fuck” what people think of him—something that Murphy yearns for but has not been capable of.

  Ryan Murphy was born in Indianapolis in 1964. Many gay men of his era have awful coming-out stories, involving years of closeted self-loathing. Murphy was never “in.” He was the sort of altar boy who fantasized not about the priesthood but about becoming the pope. (“If I cannot rise to the top of my profession,” he said, mimicking himself as a child, “I absolutely will not go!”) When he was four, his beloved maternal grandmother, Myrtle, and his mother, Andy, took him to see Barbra Streisand in Funny Girl. Murphy left the cinema in a state of bliss. “I was like”—he snapped his fingers and grinned at the memory, imitating a preschooler having an epiphany—“ ‘That’s it! I’m gay. And I’m going into show business.’ ” When he was twelve, his parents vetoed a plan to turn his bedroom into a red-painted “portal to hell.” As a compromise, he renovated it as a tribute to Studio 54: chocolate-brown shag carpeting, matte olive-colored walls, a mirrored ceiling, a shrine to Grace Kelly.

  Murphy’s mother and father were busy with work—his mother doing corporate PR, his father running circulation for a local newspaper. Grandma Myrtle lived down the street, and the two became a team. She’d make black-tar coffee, and Ryan would sit on a stool in the bathroom while she put on her face, telling him about her favorite things: Rudolph Valentino, John Wayne, vampires. They shopped for antiques; they had a regular date at a local tearoom. “She had my back,” Murphy said—and he adopted her enthusiasms, like the horror show Dark Shadows. Murphy’s parents and his brother had darker hair. He had the blond, Danish look of his maternal grandfather, who, according to family lore, was related to Hans Christian Andersen—a claim to stardom, in his view. “You’re special,” his grandmother told him. “Don’t let them tell you you’re not.”

  Myrtle’s influence infuriated his father. A taciturn Irish Catholic jock, Jim Murphy was disturbed by what he perceived as Ryan’s alien quality. He would wake him up late at night, take him to the kitchen, and ask him unanswerable questions: “Why don’t I see myself in you?” He beat him, too—something that was common in his neighborhood. “It was Irish working-class Indiana,” Murphy said. “The kid down the street was also beaten, with leather belts, for being over curfew.” His father, though, was trying to beat his sexuality, his difference—his taste—out of him. When Ryan was small, he stole a red high-heeled shoe from Woolworths; his father smacked him in the face. (More reasonably, he made him apologize to the manager.) When Ryan was ten, he watched Gone with the Wind on television. During a commercial break, his father heard him reciting the Wilkeses’ barbecue scene in the bathroom and asked Ryan why he was performing the girl parts. Ryan replied, “Because they’re the better parts”—and his father backhanded him across the bathroom. By that point, Ryan had developed armor. Brushing himse
lf off, he icily asked his father if he could continue watching the movie.

  His relationship with his mother was different, but not much better. (Murphy compares his mother to the boundary-violating one depicted in Carrie Fisher’s Postcards from the Edge.) He traces his obsession with control to a bad memory of a Christmas pageant in which he’d been given the role of a Christmas tree. Murphy was determined to make a splash: A girl was planning an electrified outfit, and he wanted to compete. Every day, he nervously reminded his mother to get a Butterick sewing pattern and the material for a costume. She reassured him that she’d done it—until the day of the pageant, when she handed him a garbage bag with armholes. Although he was only in first grade, he recalls having the revelation that he couldn’t trust anyone; he’d have to do everything himself, or risk humiliation. His friend Bart Brown thought Murphy was exaggerating, until later, when Brown became close to Murphy’s parents, and got Andy to acknowledge that the incident had happened—an enormous relief to Murphy, who often felt gaslighted by his family’s denial of past events. (Murphy’s mother told me that she remembers the story, but differently: She didn’t own a sewing machine and was embarrassed that she wasn’t good at crafts.)