Given its annual reboot, I felt comfortable leaping in to the third season of Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk’s anthology series American Horror Story with no prior experience of the show. I had been a fair-weather fan of Murphy and Falchuk’s Glee, which seemed to alternate heavy-handed, preachy treacle (bullying

The obvious comparison for Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave, given their similar Oscar-bait pedigrees and chronological proximity, is to Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained. Both tackle the subject of slavery, both return the national gaze to our most tragic and indefensible moment, and both emphasize, in particular, the horrors of