Last February Murphy ignited this non-controversy about the upcoming season during an appearance on Bravo’s Watch What Happens Livewith Andy Cohen when he told the host, “I don’t have a title but the season that we begin shooting in June is going to be about the election that we just went through.” When Cohen quizzed if Trump would be a character, Murphy would only say “maybe.” Enraged Trump supporters called for an early boycott -- and Murphy may have committed ratings suicide.
“I've been reading about it online,” he told us. “Conservatives, and people in the Rust Belt who have loved the show [have tweeted] ‘I'm out. I can't believe that you're tackling this.’ They don't understand that on our show every side gets it just as much.”
In fact, the premise of AHS: Cult was hatched years ago and is something Murphy had been toying with since season two. It was finding a new take on an old phenomenon that proved challenging for the creator. “For many seasons, the runner-up idea for the show had been Charles Manson and the Manson family,” Murphy explained. “We're coming up on the 50th anniversary of that and I’d been researching it, but it never felt right to me.
“It’s also been done a million times and I didn't know how to make it fresh,” he continued. “But the thing that I just kept being drawn back to was the idea about ‘cultive’ personalities. I wanted to do it three years in a row but it was discarded. This time last year, everybody was talking about the election, so around September 1st of last year is when the idea of the election being the jumping-off point [happened]. Then, mixing the idea of the Manson ‘cultive’ personality and somebody who rises like that, within a sort of disenfranchised community, took root. The interesting thing is, at that point everybody thought Hillary Clinton was going to win in a landslide. So the opening [of the series] was a little different.”