If you are a responsible citizen of the Internet, then surely you have heard of one Nicolas Cage.
"I said, put the bunny back in the box."
The actor is one of the best of his generation, an Academy Award winner who makes a great
film every few years. But in between, he takes pretty much any gig offered to him, then he
commits, goddammit, which results in this.
"No, no, not the bees! Not the bees! Aggghhh!"
But Television should get its own Nicolas Cage, and in the grand tradition of TV, he
should sort of feel like a department store knockoff of Cage.
Fortunately, we TV fans have just that, and we’ve had him for years now. His name is
Dylan McDermott.
He might have been Emmy-nominated for his work on The Practice, but his true strength?
It’s shouting about things.
"I needed you, and you got a dog!"
"It was me you should have been curling up with at night!"
It’s entirely possible McDermott himself didn’t know he was TV’s Nicolas Cage,
but as with so many things, Glee co-creator Ryan Murphy looked deep into McDermott’s
soul and saw a raving lunatic just waiting to get out. He made McDermott the male lead
of the first season of American Horror Story, and a legend was born.
"She's having twins, and only one of them is mine."
"The sad fact is that I'm shooting blanks. You can ask my ex-wife. We tried for five
years." "All it takes is one good swimmer."
Throughout that season, McDermott gave the pitch of utter, defeated angst to so many
terrible lines that it became possible to watch the show entirely to see what he would
say next.
"You ruined everything!"
Even better: it was never entirely possible to tell if McDermott was in on the joke or
not, which made his performance seem all the more bizarre. He returned for an arc in season
two, in which he played the main character’s murderous offspring.
[Screaming]
Sadly, it was a bit of a letdown.
"This is delicate work!"
He went from Horror Story to CBS’s Hostages, but he brought with him a strong sense that
what TV needed was frowny faces and random words being whispered.
"You're gonna kill the President of the United States, Helen. Otherwise, we will... kill
your family."
Now, he’s on CBS’s new 'Stalker.' The show is awful, and it tries too hard to make
him “serious.” But there are flickers here and there. What new horizons of insanity
will Dylan McDermott open up for us? Only time will tell.