Branding is central to Ryan Murphy’s TV empire, but the brand names themselves can often feel a bit fungible.

Take Murphy’s output in this current two-week period: FXs American Sports Story: Aaron Hernandez absolutely could have been renamed Hernandez: Monster – The Story of Aaron Hernandez. The one from Netflix Monsters: The Story of Lyle and Erik Menendez probably could been Feud: the Menendez family. I haven’t seen ABC Doctor Odysseybut all promotion indicates this is so 9-1-1: Love Boat.

On that changing scale, FXs Big question easily had the American horror story name added for it. With hints of Sect, Coven And Asylum It’s immediately clear that it seems to be an almost everything bagel approach to that series’ signatures.

After just two episodes (none were available to critics prior to the premiere), it’s too early to tell whether that description will prove limiting, even given how expansive the series is. American horror story has become a franchise. Although the series has a suitably daring but extremely overfamiliar start, neither are the titles Big question nor American Horror Story: Grotesquerie would really be the best reason to watch it – namely the absolute pleasure of seeing Niecy Nash front and center as the undisputed star of what could be her own brand ownership within the Murphy empire. The co-creator has done well with Nash in the past, setting her up for a well-deserved Emmy win for the Dahmer thing. But this latest effort could turn into one of her best roles.

Nash plays Lois Tryon, a weary police detective nearing the end of his career in a small town where the electricity doesn’t work and it always seems to rain. Lois, who keeps a careful record of all the heinous crimes she has solved over the years, has a major drinking problem. She also struggles to keep together the last remnants of a family, including daughter Merritt (Raven Goodwin), brilliant at puzzles and completely uninterested in changing her eating habits for her health, and husband Marshall (Courtney B. Vance), a former professor of philosophy. is now in a coma in the hospital.

At the beginning of the story, Lois is called in for the gruesome fivefold murder of a family that is slaughtered in a ritual and exotic culinary manner. The case looks like nothing Lois and her colleagues have ever encountered, but it won’t stay that way for long. Over the next two chapters, Lois will have to report on at least three more murderous scenes, each more gruesome and religiously specific than the last.

It’s this last element that catches the attention of Sister Megan (Micaela Diamond), a journalistic nun who believes the murders are an interconnected part of something borderline apocalyptic that Lois can’t understand.

Created by Murphy, Jon Robin Baitz and Joe Baken, Big question plays like CBS/Paramount+’s Evil meet Seven – a bleak fin de siècle commentary on a society in disarray, made all the more ominous because no century is coming to an end. We’re just stuck here. Between rampant homelessness, a global pandemic, and a spiritual crisis of faith so dire that even churches are resorting to clickbait journalism to get people into the pews, the world simply no longer makes sense. This causes serious problems for Lois, who prides herself on her meticulous logic. But it presents an opportunity for Sister Megan, who may not understand what is happening but has the necessary Biblical language to speculate.

As stated in Max Winkler’s opening episodes: Big question is a harsh and depressing place where everyone seems to be wading in the same mud. That includes the lecherous nurse Redd (Lesley Manville), who provides care to Lois’s husband who is either openly perverted or just appears to be perverted through Lois’s cynical lens. Even Sister Megan’s boss, Father Charlie (Nicholas Alexander Chavez), is both a man of true crime and a self-torturer of God.

“I tell myself that I only watch things like this out of concern for the victims, out of compassion,” Father Charlie confesses. “But the truth is, I have a bit of a morbid fascination with these crime shows and podcasts.”

In this way, Father Charlie speaks both for Ryan Murphy’s TV empire and for the public, who may want to rise above this malaise but invariably wallow in it.

That could make it all Big question Sounds like a telly lament, but it isn’t. Or at least not always. Sure, Baitz enjoys a Biblical monologue about the changing nature of good and evil. But framed another way, this drama could be described as a rather wacky and wild buddy cop show where the crime-fighting partners are an alcoholic detective and an obscenity-spewing nun – right down to an in-series reference to Cagney and Lacey.

It’s a show where a nun and a priest sit in a restaurant eating burgers and debating their favorite serial killers (Father Charlie is a big fan of Ed Gein, who not even vaguely coincidentally will be the focus of the next series). Sample season on Netflix). It’s so self-consciously bleak that the filth doesn’t exactly read as a parody, but definitely as a fetish or a form of kink. It’s like a version of Real detective willing to accept his place as more pulp than prestige.

It starts out bleak – Carolina Costa’s cinematography makes the moral miasma concrete and challenges us to desperately look for the beams of light or short bursts of levity – but still doesn’t feel monotonous, in large part because of the ruthless attitude of Nash. cuts straight through. Lois is, by design, the kind of archetypal, hard-boiled, hard-drinking, borderline-nihilistic investigator that genre paintings have traditionally limited to middle-aged white men. Nash makes the trope fresh again, because she couldn’t play a flat archetype if she tried.

Her flashbacks with Vance convey in a few minutes the credibility of a decades-long relationship, stripped of all current affection but rich in accumulated memories. Her scenes with the excellent Goodwin balance affection and total resignation beautifully. And watching Nash and Manville argue, using nothing but lacerating words, is such an obviously campy spectacle that it’s a wonder we haven’t gotten a full video yet. American horror story season previously devoted to it. We definitely will after this.

In her first extended TV role, Broadway star Diamond is an immediately likable breakout performance. She reminds you of other unusual and crazy religious characters, but she never settles as just one form of weird. She is especially good opposite Chavez, who shows much more restraint in his boundless charisma than he does as Lyle Menendez in Monsters asked of him. But once Father Charlie started masturbating and then mortifying the flesh, he became the kind of debauched man of the cloth that I’ve seen too many times to find even remotely shocking.

Unfortunately, a lot of that familiarity is in the early episodes of Big question. Despite the fact that the title and the cutaways of vomiting cops want to suggest something operatic and, well, grotesque, incomprehensible, what we ultimately get here is not quite that. Though it’s certainly more disturbing than your average 300-episode serial killer Criminal mindsit is less inspired and outré than the corpse of True Detective: Nightland.

Maybe things will really get distorted once Travis Kelce shows up? There’s not much point in putting a lot of effort into casting the football star if you’re not going to do something that will confuse him. But for now, Nash and company offer reasons to hang in there Big question at least a few more weeks.