Summer television is an interesting animal. Most of your favorites are on hiatus, leaving you sifting through a mishmash of reality television to fill your evening hours. In order to be worthwhile, summer television must be one of two things: scandalous enough to keep viewers intrigued, like Lifetime’s UnREAL, or so unabashedly ridiculous that they cannot look away, like Zoo. Unfortunately, CBS’s new family-driven thriller American Gothic is neither. With a predictable storyline and bland characters, there isn’t much here to set it apart.
The series centers around the Hawthornes, an affluent Boston family who may or may not be (they definitely are) connected to a serial killer known as Silver Bells. Fourteen years ago, the murders stopped, just around the time that the Hawthornes’ oldest son, Garrett (Antony Starr) disappeared, which apparently none of the siblings put together before now. Patriarch Mitchell (Jamey Sheridan) and his wife, Madeline (Virginia Madsen), have kept the rest of the family together since then, with their daughter Alison (Juliet Rylance) launching a mayoral campaign with a well-honed image and seemingly perfect family, Tessa (Megan Ketch), the baby of the family who’s only characteristics are sweet and married to a cop, and then their other son Cam (Justin Chatwin, wearing the most distractingly terrible wig in recent memory), who may be a junkie but who’s also a commercially successful cartoonist. On top of Cam’s fight for sobriety (he doesn’t fight hard), he’s got a pending divorce and a son named Jack (Gabriel Bateman) who likes to draw autopsies and perform gruesome experiments on cats. The timeline may not line up for little Jack to be Silver Bells, but this kid definitely has serial killer tendencies.
As the family gathers to support Alison’s campaign, a tunnel using Hawthorne concrete collapses, revealing a Silver Bells murder weapon. The ensuing stress sends Mitchell to the hospital with a heart attack, and draws Garrett out of seclusion. With the family back together again, American Gothic does it’s best to raise suspicion about every single Hawthorne after a box of silver bells and newspaper clippings (with adolescent Cam’s scribblings on it, so you know it’s legit) are found in storage.
Is Mitchell’s heart attack indicative of a guilty conscience? Is he covering for his wife (who is definitely a murderer, potentially a serial killer)? Did Garrett flee after he was found out 14 years ago? He seems to be the most obvious candidate for a stereotypical serial killer, with his penchant for lurking, shaving his massive beard with a hunting knife, and sleeping creepily on the floor with his eyes open.
The problem is that none of the characters really rise above their own blandness to feel like a legitimate threat. The mystery will surely be a season-long arc and finding out which Hawthorne is actually Silver Bells may be enough to keep viewers around. However, if the heavy-handedness and terrible dialogue continues, I can’t imagine many sticking with it. The show either needs to get much campier or much better written. There is value in bad television sometimes, but a show can’t be bad and boring. That’s the kiss of death, especially in the middle of the summer. It’s baffling that a show that feels so much like a parody of an actual thriller can be so dull, but somehow American Gothic pulls it off.
It seems a little unfair to judge a show so harshly based on its pilot. Many stellar shows had rocky pilots before figuring out what worked and what didn’t. The first episode is written and produced by Corinne Brinkerhoff, who has worked extensively on shows like The Good Wife, Jane The Virgin, and Elementary, so she’s not without talent or experience. There are also good performers in the bunch — Madsen is a legend and Chatwin was excellent on Shameless — but no one can seem to rise above the terrible material they’re given. Instead, they wander around the family estate, delivering dialogue with baffling timing, like people who have never actually spoken to other human beings before. While viewers are supposed to get a sense that something is “off” about this family and their seemingly put together veneer, the show itself feels off.
CBS has a fairly standard formula. The good guys are good, the bad guys are bad, and most are procedurals. While American Gothic does subvert that a bit with the family drama and ambiguity over who is the serial killer, it isn’t enough to elevate it above a rote thriller. You could wile away a few hours on it this summer, but you’d be better off watching some of those Hitchcock films you keep saying you’ll watch someday. No better time than the present.
