Ryan Murphy

This interview originally appeared in the MIPCOM 2014 issue of World Screen.

Just tell Ryan Murphy that something can’t be done and he’ll find a way to do it. He has built a successful career going against convention, tackling genres he was told had never been done or the audience wouldn’t accept. But they did, and his shows have not only garnered high ratings, but a slew of awards as well.

Throughout his career, Murphy has tackled a number of diverse subjects and genres, but a common thread in all of his shows has been his pursuit of some sort of social message: people’s obsession with plastic surgery in Nip/Tuck; the struggles of underdog high schoolers in Glee; ideas about infidelity, sanity and oppression in American Horror Story; and the suffering and discrimination the gay community faced during the onset of the HIV-AIDS crisis in New York in the early ’80s in The Normal Heart. Key to Murphy’s success has been his desire to always make shows that haven’t been done before.

WS: Glee is so hopeful and about communities coming together while American Horror Story is dark and twisted and evil. I’m almost scared to ask where that comes from!
MURPHY: That’s funny! When I was a kid I was obsessed with Dark Shadows and horror movies, largely because of my grandmother, who was a real horror aficionado. She would drag me to stuff and make me watch it. I always just loved it. [When I was thinking about American Horror Story] there was something in the culture that had gone away, which was the anthological miniseries idea. I also loved those when I was a kid. So I thought how could I make all of this work. The idea was to keep the title and the idea that we were going to be examining real-life American horror stories, some years more fun than others. Every year we would reboot it and have a completely new story and completely new grouping of characters but with the same large group of actors. At the time, when I pitched it, it seemed like such a radical idea that it took me a long time to get everybody on board with it. But then it came on the air and it clicked because it felt different and that’s the key to success in television. I’ve had great success and then I’ve not had success, but the things in my career that have really popped are usually things that shouldn’t work or genres that have gone out of favor or genres that have never worked. It’s sort of a weird career that I’ve had, but I love that I’m able to follow my passion.

WS: Since your first series, Popular, how have you seen the role of the showrunner evolve?
MURPHY: Well, the business is so different. When I got Popular on the air in 1999, the landscape had started to change. Things had started to move. There were certainly Steven Bochco and David E. Kelley and David Chase was in the middle of his great success on The Sopranos. But there was no real cable like there is today, so broadcast network executives had a lot more power to dictate rules and say, You have to do this note or we’re not airing your show, or, You’re fired. I remember the network executives on Popular say some of the most appalling things about women, about gay people, about sexuality, just because they were afraid. They were afraid of protests. They were afraid of losing advertisers and I would try and fight them the best I could. I didn’t win all those battles.

Right around when Nip/Tuck started, that’s when things started to change and that’s when the term showrunner came in. That began in the early 2000s, the rise of auteur television, and that was about a vision and that vision is everything. It’s respected and admired and listened to more than it ever was before. Now I don’t really get notes from executives. I get this amazing thing—I get brilliant ideas from them. They say, look, this is your show and you’re going to do what you want to do and we have empowered you and believe in you, but what if we tried this, or what if we tried that? And that is what showrunners are lucky enough to do now. It feels more creative and it’s about a singular voice.

The landscape of how notes are given has changed. And now [network executives] want you to push the envelope; now they want you to be more daring. Back then, forget it, it was not in the water, at least not in my experience. There is much more freedom now. Different voices are more celebrated than ever before because with a strong voice comes success and ratings. People are learning that. The 18th watered-down sitcom about a family living in New York, nobody wants to watch that anymore. They used to but I think people are changing and we are in the midst of a great revolution.

WS: What upcoming projects do you have?
MURPHY: I own a lot of books that I’m looking at but I don’t really know what I want to do next. I have a lot of things on my plate that I am working on and I feel great about. The Normal Heart was such a great experience, I’m finishing Glee, and in the next six months I’m on to the next American Horror Story, so I feel that for the first time ever in my career I can wait to see what I’m interested in.

WS: Nip/Tuck pushed a lot of envelopes. What did you want to accomplish with that show?
MURPHY: There were two things. First, I was really interested in doing a show about this obsession in our culture with the manifestation of physicality—how you can work your ass off and usually that is the wrong thing you need to be working on. I wanted to do a show about people fixing themselves on the outside when really what they should have been working on was the inside. Second, I wanted to do a really strong male friendship show, which I hadn’t seen in many years—a heterosexual love story somewhat modeled on the one in Carnal Knowledge by Mike Nichols. That was my goal.

WS: How did you get a lot of what you wanted to put in the show approved by FX? That must have been a tough battle!
MURPHY: The first two years were very tough. I’ve always had a very good relationship with all the executives at every network I have worked at, for the most part, so the battles were always with Standards and Practices. But those battles were never based on the people who were giving me the notes, they were always based on precedent. They were based on, “Well, we’ve never done this. This has never been done on television at this hour.” My response was, “Well, that doesn’t mean that’s right.” So I spent a lot of time those first two years fighting the Standards fight. It was pretty appalling to me because it was always about nudity, never about violence. You could cut a woman’s head off but you couldn’t show a nipple. I always thought that that was absolutely atrocious. So I fought for that, I fought for sexuality, particularly for the female characters. And then after two years, the show was a hit and was winning awards and they backed off a little bit. There were a lot of protests and it got a little bit ugly in the middle there! But I worked my way through it.

WS: How did Glee come about?
MURPHY: I wanted to do the opposite of what I had done before. Nip/Tuck was very dark, very sexualized. I felt at a certain point unrelentingly sad. I felt that writing about plastic surgery was depressing, so I wanted to do something optimistic and buoyant. I also wanted to do it because everyone was saying it’s never been done and it will never work. I liked the challenge of that and sometimes I move toward ideas only because of that. So I had a great team at the studio and the network and I went in with this idea. They said, “We love it. We don’t know if it will work, but let’s try it.” It was one of those magical things with the perfect script and the perfect cast, the music and everything worked and it felt very fresh and new. Half the cast had never been in front of a camera, let alone on a sound stage. It was a very magical thing and then there was the little-engine-that-could element to it. It was a show about underdogs and it was an underdog. When it started out it wasn’t a hit. That took about a year and then it exploded.

WS: With American Horror Story you’ve brought back the anthology series. Do the actors like playing completely different characters from one year to the next?
MURPHY: They love it. Someone like Jessica Lange, Sarah Paulson or Kathy Bates were really not interested at this point in their careers in signing on to the same role for seven years. Actually, for the actors American Horror Story feels like a movie, a long movie that we shoot for five months and then you’re done and say goodbye to that character, never to see it again, and go off to the next thing. I know Jessica [Lange] in particular really loves it because every year is a challenge. The cast likes some seasons better just because they like the story better, or the look of it better, but they pretty much trust me with what I want to do, which is a great reward and gratifying for me.

WS: I read you pursued The Normal Heart at great personal expense. Why was it important for you to make that movie?
MURPHY: Well it’s twofold. When I was in college I saw the play [by Larry Kramer], which I loved. It was very important to me growing up. I read it when I was 18 or 19. First, I went at it as a fan but then I lost many friends to AIDS and I grew up as a gay man terrified that I was not going to live. Now I am in my 40s, married with a child, and gay marriage is on its way—I hope and believe—to being legal throughout these United States. So I was appalled that no one had been able to make that story. And young people in my life did not know that story. They did not know the sacrifices. They did not know the pain and the fear and the discrimination. What we have today as gay people is because those activists started that civil rights movement, so I just called up Larry and said, “I hate the fact that nobody’s been able to get this movie made. I can get it made. I’ll put my own money down. I’ll fight and get this beautiful script perfect. I’ll get the best cast we can and I’m going to get it made.” He didn’t know me but I had such passion for him and his work and the ideas in it and I loved it so much. And I put my money where my mouth was. I broke into my IRA and I bought his play. I bought it so that it didn’t have to go through a development hell situation, which it had. It was also one of the sacred texts, in my opinion, in theater history. There are not a lot of them. I wanted to do it and I fought and I worked with Larry for three years every day. It was hard but every day was a blessing and I loved it.

It’s rare to do a piece where you’re not just hopefully creating art but also launching a discussion. That’s what we wanted to do and I have found that that’s what we were lucky enough to do. Close to six million people in the U.S. have seen The Normal Heart on television, which is why I wanted to do it on television. I get emails from young people saying they didn’t know, which I knew they didn’t, and now they do and they are interested in activism, which is the great unexpected joy. The Normal Heart is probably the only thing in my career that I have ever done selflessly. I didn’t make any money; I wasn’t interested in making any money. Anything that I got paid I put back in the production. I just had such a burning passion for it and felt such an obligation to just get it right.

WS: You’ve been compared to Norman Lear. Are there other writers or producers you have admired?
MURPHY: I admire so many people, but growing up the person who I looked up to the most because his work had social implications was Norman. So whenever I am compared to him it’s such a thrill because it’s what I want to do in my work. Some people say it’s just entertainment, but I always had a social message I wanted to get out. I do the same in American Horror Story and The Normal Heart and the things I’m working on now—that’s what I’m interested in doing. I’m interested in touching people and hopefully changing hearts and minds. The fact that I get to do it and get to be paid and have this amazing life is unbelievable. When I was growing up I never imagined that. In my wildest dreams, never did I imagine that I would be able to touch people in that way and that’s the best thing about what I do.