One Season Wonders: American Gothic Dove Deep Into the Darkness

In the years before streaming, extremely niche TV shows faced uphill battles against cancellation. As a result, TV history is littered with the corpses of shows struck down before their time. In One Season Wonders, Ken Lowe revisits one of the unique, promising scripted shows struck down before they had a chance to shine. This month: American Gothic.

Horror just isn’t for everyone, and in the landscape of Big Three television, that’s a killer. One Season Wonders is about shows that scratched someone’s itch somewhere, but the common thread is that they just couldn’t get enough eyeballs to get that second season. In the case of American Gothic, a 1995, Sam Raimi-produced Southern Gothic story that takes some truly dark and lurid turns over its 22 episodes (and that was shockingly created by ’70s teen pop idol Shaun Cassidy), it was a recipe for both absolutely getting canceled yet lingering in the minds of viewers for at least 30 years after its release. This one is still occasionally getting a revisit and a writeup, despite the fact it was at times an uneven and confused debut.

In the years following the runaway success (and the sad petering-out) of Twin Peaks, it must have seemed like American viewers were primed for another creepy, strangely supernatural show informed by its own unique logic, set in a town whose order is underpinned by secrets and lies.

If anybody could’ve pulled off that kind of feat of auteurism a second time, it just might have been Raimi, a guy with as keen a sense for the campy as for the icky. Unfortunately, while Peaks got two seasons (to start…) American Gothic got only this messy, twisty season.

The Show

The town of Trinity, South Carolina is quiet and orderly, the sort of place you’d want to raise your kids. Many folks would say the town’s quiet prosperity is due to the steadfast leadership of Sheriff Lucas Buck (Gary Cole, playing a slightly less evil character than his most well-known role of the tedious boss in Office Space). In reality, Buck’s smalltown charisma masks a possessive, scheming ruthlessness. Everyone in town, the powerful and the meek, the wealthy and the impoverished, the celebrities and the unknowns, are all under his thumb somehow. He maintains his iron grip on the town through strange demonic powers that are never fully explained in the show’s short run, but recall the sorcery of David Lynch’s Bob or Stephen King’s Randall Flagg. His superpower is darkly poetic justice, always at the expense of innocence.

The first episode comes right out of the gate with exactly how irredeemably evil Buck is. Young Caleb Temple (Lucas Black, who remains a willing character actor to this day) is celebrating a birthday. His sister Merlyn (Sarah Paulson) has been in a state of near-catatonia for years, and both suffer under the abusive hand of their father. Caleb’s mother died giving birth to him. And, on this night when Caleb’s father flies off the handle and attacks his children, we witness Sheriff Buck take an opportunity alone in the house to kill Caleb’s sister.

American Gothic sets its chess pieces up with speed, and it’s a dark picture: Buck actually fathered Caleb by raping his mother. Merlyn witnessed the crime, and has been parroting the last thing she said on the evening it happened, a kind of mantra of the series: “Someone’s at the door.”

The show follows Caleb as he discovers these ghastly truths and that they also grant him a measure of power and a destiny to follow in Buck’s sinister footsteps. Along the way, he’s befriended by and protected by a city-boy doctor gone local, Dr. Crower (Jake Weber, written out of the show halfway through the season for reasons that elude me), and the big city reporter cousin who comes into town to try to adopt him, Gail (Paige Turco). Buck’s former girlfriend, seductive local schoolteacher Selena Coombs (Brenda Bakke) has designs of her own that revolve around Buck’s power and Caleb’s unknowable potential. And Merlyn’s ghost appears to Caleb as the angel on his right shoulder as the show prosecutes his descent toward evil.

This is a show that left its mark on viewers. Buck’s evil may be supernatural and uncanny, but it’s also gruesomely down-to-earth right from the jump. He sees Caleb, a child born of one of his assaults, as his property and legacy. He sees Trinity as his personal stomping grounds, and he sees his power as an excuse to do whatever he wants. In one episode, it becomes necessary for him to discredit Dr. Crower in court so that he doesn’t get custody of the orphaned Caleb. Buck preys on Crower’s history as an alcoholic and blackmails his fellow surgeon to testify against him. The means of blackmail has stuck with me for nearly 30 years: He gifts the newlywed coworker’s wife with a mirror that turns her into the mythological Narcissus, staring at herself for hours a day—Buck pops up wherever the surgeon happens to be to threaten him and state in blunt terms that he’ll fix what’s wrong if the surgeon will just rat out his friend. And when the surgeon loses it and shatters the mirror, his wife’s face suddenly scars up, as if it has shattered.

That was the petty, nasty kind of evil Buck gets up to from episode to episode as he tries to take possession of Caleb, all with either the enthusiastic support or the terrified complicity of a powerless town—the only people willing to openly defy Buck are the out-of-towners, Crower and Gail (or Merlyn, who is already dead). What’s creepier is that by the end of this single season of television, Buck is unquestionably winning: Caleb begins to come around to this dark destiny he has, and to embrace the seeming inevitability of his rise into Buck’s role as a cosmic force of darkness, all while Merlyn pleads with him to see reason. Gail is seduced by Buck and becomes pregnant with his child, another potential scion of pure evil.