Ryan Murphy fascinates me. As someone who appreciates well-crafted narratives and gripping characters, his propensity to drive his premises into meandering self indulgence and cartoonish irreverence should nauseate me. From a writing standpoint he elicits more sighs of mediocrity than shouts of genius. And yet despite it all, Murphy’s keen eye for style and homage, razor sharp dialogue and creative insanity keep me watching with rapt wonder. When he gets it right, it’s legendary.
Those first three seasons of “American Horror Story” (AHS) are more than enough to make me forgive him for the bloated waddling mess “Glee” ended up being. I have an infinite respect for the man, virtues and vices all. That being said, “Ratched” prodded my esteem for Murphy so much that if it were any more than eight episodes, I would have lost the will to binge any of his productions ever again.
“Ratched” is a prequel of sorts to the world of the classic film and book “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” telling the backstory of that film’s villain, the tyrannical battleaxe Nurse Mildred Ratched (played here by the always marvelous Sarah Paulson). If you know anything about that movie and Ryan Murphy’s style then you likely see problems bubbling up already. Nurse Ratched exhibits all the power-hungry, stifling, condescending, smiling cruelty that exists and thrives in our real-world bureaucratic institutions.
She is hateable because she is frustratingly familiar and all the abuses she ennacts on the free-thinking heroes of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” are troublingly realistic. But Ryan Murphy has never been terribly beholden to realism. When he has to develop a narrative and world of whole cloth, Murphy feels safest in caricatures and sensationalism. Two episodes into “Ratched” and Sarah Paulson has already driven a man to suicide, covered it up, manipulated her way into power and lobotomized an innocent man to stop him from testifying against her secret serial killer brother.
Predictably, making her evil more overt and gory makes Nurse Ratched less hateable, as she becomes less familiar to us. She bears no resemblance to her classic counterpart, and while you can say that it’s just a take on the old Nurse Ratched we know, what’s the point if they are nothing alike anyway?
While her crimes don’t make us hate her, they also prevent us from liking her when the show tells us Ratched is a morally gray antihero who we should root for. Any coherent characterization of Ratched is kneecapped by how duplicitous she is written to be. The fact that we never truly know if she is being genuine would be captivating if Ratched were a secondary character and not the protagonist who we are supposed to know and get close to. “Ratched” should have told the fall of a well-meaning nurse. She should be slowly corrupted by the bureaucracy she has immersed herself in—leading her to tragically turn to authoritarianism in order to enact real change. Instead, Murphy took an iconic symbol of institutional dominance and melted her down into just another blythe American Horror Story killer—except Ratched lacks the cutting tongue those murderers and even the original Nurse Ratched possessed.
If Ryan Murphy should be commended for one thing in his filmography, it should be his commitment to representation. His shows are full of queer, multiracial and repressed heroes and he wears his politics on his sleeve (looking at you “AHS: Cult”). However, sometimes it can feel forced. “Ratched” may be the worst of it.
Nurse Ratched is a closeted lesbian in the show, which would be fine if her being so had any real meaning or message. She struggles with being a lesbian in the background for a couple episodes before just deciding randomly to be in a loving relationship with a woman she barely knows, all the while continuing to do horrible things so she can be empowering. A better story might give her being closeted some weight. Ratched might have to choose between embracing who she is and finding true happiness, or denying her true self so she can be accepted by society and have power and respect. The pressure to shun your true sexuality because society sees it as unsavory is a pain known by many in the LGBTQ community, especially if you are already part of a minority or disenfranchised group and fear making your life even harder. We could have watched Ratched try to find happiness in who she is and balance it with her ambitions before tragically denying it all to have the superficial and fleeting joys of authority. Instead, Ratched is just a lesbian because Murphy wanted her to be and remains a boring character with nothing to say about anything.
This lack of consequence or depth is a familiar refrain in Ryan Murphy productions and wracks “Ratched” like a leperous disease. Characters Ratched threatens and blackmails in one episode are all chummy with her in the next. Ratched’s love interest leaves her husband for the nurse after one short conversation, gets blackmailed by Ratched later on only to start dating her anyway, and develops lung cancer off screen, just so it can triumphantly be cured in the following episode. People get gruesomely murdered and maimed with little consequence, random nothing characters are given thorough backstories just to disappear after their one scene, people switch sides and motivations like shrugging off coats. It honestly feels like each episode only influences the one immediately after it, without any build up or development of tension or character over the course of the season.
Ratched possesses Murphy’s stark and electrifying style of surgical camera work and methodical colors and sets, but that’s standard by now. Most of Murphy’s shows are stylistically pleasing but many have worthwhile stories to back it up. They’re not just a painted shell. Just watch Murphy’s “AHS: Asylum” on Netflix instead. It’s basically the same thing as “Ratched” except its story doesn’t feel lobotomized.
