CULTURE

Ryan Murphy Doesn’t Have Feud Season 2 Planned Just Yet

But he has plenty of ideas for future seasons of "American Crime Story."

Feb. 4, 2019

Kurt Iswarienko/FX

There’s no shortage of famous feuds throughout Hollywood history, but none of them, apparently, are interesting enough to be turned into an eight-episode Emmy-winning miniseries. Following the success of 2017’s Feud: Bette and Joan, Ryan Murphy was slated to create a follow-up series about yet another long-standing, star-studded dispute, but at the Television Critics Association’s winter press tour on Monday, FX CEO John Landgraf said no such second season of Feud is in the works.

“Right now Ryan doesn’t have another idea for the next cycle of Feud. Having worked with Ryan for 16 years, he gets inspired by something and calls and tells you, ‘I have another cycle coming,'” Landgraf said, according to The Hollywood Reporter. “I wouldn’t be surprised to get a call that he has an idea, but we don’t have one at the moment.”

Originally, Feud season 2, which began development in early 2017, was supposed to be subtitled Buckingham Palace, focusing on Prince Charles and Princess Diana’s tumultuous relationship. In August 2018, however, Landgraf told THR that the idea had been completely scrapped—despite the fact that the show had already reportedly been cast, with Matthew Goode and Rosamund Pike set to take on the lead roles. “We did [have it cast], but we decided we didn’t feel we had the material right and decided not to move forward with it,” he said at the time.

What Murphy and FX do have, however, is a plethora of concepts planned for another über-successful Murphy franchise, American Crime Story. “We have three or four ideas in active development where we’ve acquired rights and done a fair amount of research and have writers working on them,” Landgraf said this week of the potential follow-ups to The People v. O. J. Simpson and The Assassination of Gianni Versace. “I couldn’t tell you what will be ready first. The likelihood is all of them may be produced over time.”

Murphy has discussed several of his previous ideas for future seasons of American Crime Story, though Landgraf confirmed that those, which reached rather advanced levels of development, had been scrapped. At first, the prolific showrunner was set to follow his O.J. Simpson series with one about Hurricane Katrina; again, several major roles had already reportedly been cast, including Dennis Quaid as President George W. Bush and Annette Bening as former Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco, but Landgraf said on Monday, “As far as I know, Katrina is not still in the mix.”

After nixing the Katrina installment of the anthology series, Murphy turned to Monica Lewinsky and Jeffrey Toobin’s best seller A Vast Conspiracy: The Real Sex Scandal that Nearly Brought Down a President for inspiration. But in April 2018, the showrunner told THR that he was having second thoughts. “I told [Lewinsky], ‘Nobody should tell your story but you, and it’s kind of gross if they do,'” he said at the time. “‘If you want to produce it with me, I would love that; but you should be the producer, and you should make all the goddamn money.'”

Still, even without those two bombshell ideas, there are multiple more seasons of American Crime Story on the way—and more American Horror Story, and more Pose, and more still-to-be-announced projects borne of his Netflix partnership. Perhaps Murphy is looking elsewhere in Toobin’s bibliography for ideas (Toobin also wrote the book on which the O.J. Simpson season was based) and will create a series based on the 2000 presidential election or on Patty Hearst’s shocking history. Or if he’s looking for a more recent tale of American crime, it wouldn’t be out of the realm of possibility for Murphy to adapt Bad Blood, the story of the dramatic failure of Silicon Valley wunderkind Elizabeth Holmes’s healthcare start-up Theranos.

Whatever he chooses to dramatize, though, expect it to be very good and very likely to win all the awards.