American Horror Story: It might be time to retire this tired series

When American Horror Story first started in 2011, it was was fresh, had a great cast, and was something a bit different on TV in that it was edgy, quite risque for television, and had a fantastic cast including Kathy Bates, Jessica Lange, and Angela Bassette. I had never seen anything like it and was extremely impressed as I ate up the episodes as soon as they were released.

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The first season focused on a new house being haunted that a family just relocated to which, in itself is not a terribly original thing, but it hadn't been done very often in a series - hence, it kind of worked and managed to pull in an average of 3 million viewers despite being on at 10pm on Wednesdays on a relatively minor network (FX.)

The hype surrounding the show was fantastic, and they managed to capture the highly sought after demographic of 18-35 year old's, which from my very limited marketing experience, is the group advertisers want to approach the most presumably because they are more loose with spending money at that age.

Season 2, called "Asylum" was arguably even better and as the name would indicate we traveled to another very creepy location to continue the story although it was in no way connected to the first season. This was a bit strange at first because it mostly had the same cast, but they were simply playing entirely different roles.

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The time period was the mid 60's rather than modern times and I feel as though they pulled this off wonderfully. Much of the horror was provided by a serial killer as well as touches of aliens getting mixed into the story.

Despite the fact that I personally thought it was better than season 1, they lost about a million viewers per week on average so they went back to the drawing board and totally redeemed themselves in season 3.

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It was called "Coven" and it took on almost an entirely witchcraft oriented theme, which must have went over well with audiences because they jumped to nearly 4.5 million average viewers per week. Personally, I feel as though the success had a lot to do with the fact that they pursued and extremely sexual approach to the episodes, and particularly in relation to Madison Montgomery (Emma Roberts), this was probably a very welcome addition for the younger male (and probably some of the female) audience.

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I'm not going to go into the details surrounding the following seasons in full, but Season 4, called "Freak Show" was simply weird and off-putting for most people as it featured a cast with freak-show-ish deformations and focused heavily on Kathy Bates's character Ethel, who was a "bearded woman."

It didn't connect with audiences and the ratings continued to slip throughout 2014-15.

Try as they may to regain their audience by introducing guest stars including the wildly-popular-at-the-time Lada Gaga, viewers tuned in from time to time but were not dedicated as the show struggled to maintain an audience of over 2 million viewers and later in season 8, 1 million viewers, per episode.

The latest season on Netflix is "Apocalypse" (there is a newer one, but not streaming yet) started out strong.

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Set in a dystopian future where the world has been destroyed by nuclear war, we are shown what life in a bunker for the elite and chosen would be like. Of course supernatural powers are slowly introduced but right around episode 5 it starts to look like they were running out of material as they revert to "time-travel" to show how we got to this point and somehow Satan worshiping gets involved in the mix (not that I have problem with that.)

That season managed to pull in a mere million people per episode in the target demographic and while a million seems like a lot, advertisers are generally looking for a much larger audience than this. When you consider that Big Bang Theory routinely pulled in 25-40 million, all while filming almost entirely on a sound stage.

Despite all of this, the show has been renewed for several more seasons, and I don't really understand why. I'm tired of the same faces and they can only re-hash demons, hauntings, witchcraft, and serial killers who escaped from psychiatric wards so many times before I become rather "meh" about the entire experience.

I struggled to make it through Apocalypse (only because i was half way through when I started getting bored) and probably wont watch season 9 when it drops on the ol' Netflix. This show has run its course in my mind but I am open to arguments if anyone cares to make them.

What do you think? hmmmmm?