Ellen Gray: 'Horror' gets a reboot for second season

* AMERICAN HORROR STORY: ASYLUM. 10 p.m. Wednesday, FX.

THE RESET button is Ryan Murphy's friend.

He should use it more often.

Murphy, whose "American Horror Story" anthology enters its second season Wednesday with "Asylum," a show set in a time and place far removed from the California "murder house" where common sense and subtlety went to die, is not a writer who believes in holding back.

We know this from "Nip/Tuck," from "Glee," from "The New Normal." We even know it from "The Glee Project," the Oxygen competition whose showcasing not just of genuine talent but of Murphy's mercurial approach to casting makes it one of television's best (and most infuriating) unscripted shows.

Yes, he's had help. Brad Falchuk, one of his co-creators on "Glee," also co-created "AHS." But it was Murphy who set the tone as far back as his first high school effort, "Popular" (a show I adored but which was probably built more for speed than endurance), and followed it with the less pleasant - but far more popular - plastic surgery melodrama "Nip/Tuck."

Given how he treated most of the characters on that FX hit, I wouldn't be surprised if Murphy himself hadn't sometimes wished he could kill them all and start over.

That's essentially what he's done in "American Horror Story," where some of the first season cast's been repurposed. Jessica Lange, Evan Peters, Zachary Quinto, Lily Rabe and Sarah Paulson are all regulars, playing entirely new characters, and Frances Conroy is among the guest stars, presumably doing the same.

Joining them are James Cromwell and Joseph Fiennes as regulars. Other guest stars include musician/"reality" show judge Adam Levine (in a role I really don't want to spoil), Chloë Sevigny and, at some point, Ian McShane.

Yes, Ian McShane.

(Meanwhile, you can catch escapee Connie Britton, once again alive and well, in ABC's "Nashville," which, funnily enough, also airs at 10 p.m. Wednesdays.)

As the wimp who'd never be brave - or stupid - enough to go into the attic or the basement, much less the obviously haunted mental hospital for the criminally insane, I'll never be the target audience for a show like "American Horror Story," however amazing its cast.

Yet Wednesday's premiere, written by Tim Minear, had me at "Dominique."

That earworm of an early '60s hit by "The Singing Nun" (Belgium's Sister Luc Gabriel) apparently plays incessantly in the common room of Briarcliff, a Catholic-run sanitarium for the criminally insane, on the orders of Sister Jude (Lange), who believes that "mental illness is the fashionable explanation for sin."

It's 1964. JFK is dead and Sister Jude, a tough cookie with a Kennedyesque accent, is locked in a battle for the very soul of the institution with Cromwell's Dr. Arthur Arden, who sees physiology where she sees only theology.

And whose scientific approach may be even more dangerous than his rival's spiritual one.

"You may think my mind is closed, Doctor. But my eyes are wide open, I promise you!" she warns him.

She's not getting much help from Monsignor Timothy Howard (Fiennes), who appreciates her cooking but not her critiques of Arden and who may or may not be aware she's secretly hot for him.

Not everyone's going to like this or other aspects of Sister Jude's story, which essentially does for nuns what the first season did for real estate agents. But it's the kind of cliché meant to appeal to parochial-school survivors of a certain age of which, yes, I'm one.

And Murphy another.

In any case, Lange's far from the scariest thing about "American Horror Story: Asylum," where many, if not most, of the inmates aren't nearly as crazy as their keepers and where the innocent can expect to be punished even more severely than the guilty.

Two episodes in, it's too soon to tell how much of this is going to be too much for me. I'm hoping to make it as far as McShane. Whose name, I can't help but notice, rhymes with "insane."

It helps to know what the hapless inmates of Briarcliff Manor don't: That no matter how bad it gets in there, it'll all be over after one season.