Confession of a lifelong horror fan: The first season of FX's American Horror Story left me cold, more appalled than terrified at the overindulgent mishmash of psychosexual poppycock ensnaring unpleasant characters, plus the overkill of a house teeming with too many tedious ghosts, proving the adage that more can be less — effective, that is, although the hype and the buzz carried it to a whopping 17 Emmy nominations (in the miniseries category, where the competition is less fierce).
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It wasn't the swords. It wasn't the sandals. For Rufus Sewell, the tough part was all the stinkin' mud. Playing a 12th-century stonemason in mega miniseries The Pillars of the Earth, premiering tonight on Starz at 10/9c, meant maintaining "a level of grime on my neck consistent with that of your typical farm animal," he says.
A small price, indeed, for what's shaping up to be the armor-clanking, leech-sucking, monks-a-poppin' drama of the summer. Pillars, based on Ken Follett's doorstop of a best-seller (all 973 pages of it), about the quest to build a Gothic cathedral in a fictional England of yore, runs eight hours over six Friday nights...
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