Stream It Or Skip It: ‘American Horror Story: Delicate’ On FX, Where Emma Roberts And Kim Kardashian Star In A Story About An Actress Convinced Someone Wants Her Pregnancy To Fail

When the cast of the latest installment of American Horror Story was announced, all anyone could see was the name “Kim Kardashian.” Was it strange to see the reality star in the cast of Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk’s horror series? Maybe. But we never put it past the pair to stunt-cast their shows, especially AHS. But she’s not the star of the season; Emma Roberts, playing an actress trying to have a child, is. Will Kim K. be a distraction?

AMERICAN HORROR STORY: DELICATE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A woman lies in bed, holding the hand of who she thinks is her husband. Suddenly, a dark, hooded figure jumps out of the bed. The woman chases the hooded figure, then closes a thick door when she thinks the figure is gone. Then she goes into a room, sees a torn picture of an embryo, and what looks like blood all over her hands.

The Gist: One week earlier, Anna Victoria Alcott (Emma Roberts), an actress who has just hit it big with her last project, is late for an egg retrieval appointment. She seriously thought it was at 9 AM, but her husband, Dexter Harding (Matt Czuchry), calls her and tells her it’s at 8. As she hurries out of her apartment building, she sees a mysterious woman looking at a bird’s nest on the ground, in the middle of Manhattan. Anna looks at the nest and sees a broken egg.

This is the third round of IVF that Anna and Dexter have gone through, and she wonders if he’ll stay with her if she can never conceive, or in her words, if she’s “broken.” The doctor, Andrew Hill (Denis O’Hare), is feeling good about their chances after this retrieval, and prescribes her progesterone suppositories that need to be refrigerated. On her way out of the clinic, a strange woman named Ms. Preecher (Julie White) approaches her and creepily says, “You are her.”

When she’s at home that night, after she puts in the first suppository and puts them back in the fridge, she pulls out a long hair; she has no idea where it came from.

Anna’s publicist, Siobhan Corbyn (Kim Kardashian), booked her on Watch What Happens Live, her first late night appearance. Anna considers Siobhan her best friend; the two of them met in an IVF support group, and Siobhan has done a lot to increase her visibility.

As they walk in the park, Anna asks Dexter if he and his first wife, Adeline (Annabelle Dexter-Jones), ever planned on having children; he says they talked about it but she died before they could start. He apparently is showing an artist at his gallery that Anna hears looks a lot like Adeline.

At a dinner, she’s told by their friend Talia (Juliana Canfield) that she thinks having a baby is a selfish act given global warming, etc. She then gives Anna her red lipstick, even though Anna doesn’t think she looks good in red. Anna then sees the shoes of the woman following her sticking out of the bottom of a booth.

The appearance with Andy Cohen is important, but Dr. Hill managed to create embryos from the last egg retrieval and they’re supposed to be implanted the same day as the intervew. Over both the doctor’s and Dexter’s objections, she pushes the implantation until the following day. But as she’s lying awake looking at her phone the same night, she sees the appointment on her calendar move down an hour, without her input. She wonders if she’s being hacked, and actually puts a Post-It about the appointment on the fridge.

Siobhan thinks that Anna might have a stalker, but Anna isn’t so sure. She keeps having these visions of broken eggs and people trying to keep her from getting pregnant. A doll of her teenage self, created when she was a kids’ show star, keeps popping up in places. Even during the implantation procedure, she sees disturbing visions. Then the strange hooded figure appears.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Delicate is the twelfth installment of American Horror Story; this one was adapted by Ryan Murphy, Brad Falchuk and Halley Feiffer from Danielle Valentine’s 2023 novel Delicate Condition, and definitely gives off some Rosemary’s Baby vibes.

Our Take: Let’s get what everyone wants to know out of the way first: Kim Kardashian is actually pretty decent as Siobhan. We discounted her acting skills, though it’s likely she has to do some degree of acting on her various reality shows, and we also forgot that she was pretty good when she hosted SNL. Siobhan is a good role for her, because she’s mostly there to be an aggressive publicist who is looking out for Anna as both her client and best friend. She can spew pop culture references with some credibility, and she’s a good counterweight to Roberts’ constantly-scared Anna.

That all being said, we’re not sure quite what to think of AHS: Delicate. Tonal shifts are a Ryan Murphy/Brad Falchuk staple, so seeing Anna joking with Cohen that she fucked Tom Sandoval to get on WWHL one second and being freaked out by her visions the next isn’t all that shocking. But if the story is going to be Anna finding more and more evidence that someone doesn’t want her to get pregnant and no one believing her, it’s going to be a pretty monotonous season.

What AHS is good at is being creepy and gross, and Delicate is no exception, showing not-pleasant visions of the dead bird embryos and using unsettling noises and camera angles to show Anna’s visions. But we wonder to what end are they being utilized. Will the visions that Anna is seeing prove to be real, seen by others in her life? And just who are people like Preecher, who are very real and think that Anna having offspring might be the fall of humanity as we know it?

What we also wonder is if the pop culture aspect of Anna coming into her own as an actress after being a kid star is going to invade on the horror aspects of the story. In the first episode, there were moments where her fame was a complement to the story — like the doll that keeps popping up, or Preecher’s photo of her at the clinic showing up on gossip sites. But it feels like other scenes, like the one with Andy Cohen, are there for no other reason than to make a contemporary pop culture reference. And that is going to prove to be distracting as the season goes on.

Sex and Skin: None.

Parting Shot: After discovering the ripped embryo photo, she sees the same lipstick that Talia gave her, with sheets and her nightgown covered in that same blood-red shade. Then she sees something scrawled on a mirror: “DON’T DO IT ANNA.”

Sleeper Star: The mystery woman is played by Cara Delevingne (we think), and she’s appropriately weird and off-putting here.

Most Pilot-y Line: The “I fucked Tom Sandoval” line fits here, because it makes very little sense. It’s supposed to show how charming she is on a talk show, but to us it feels like a forced reference.

Our Call: STREAM IT. AHS: Delicate has the potential to be a good installment of American Horror Story, because of good performances from Roberts and Kim K. But there are also a lot of red flags that indicate that the season may get too weighed down in the pop culture aspect of Roberts’ character at the sacrifice of actual blood and horror.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.