The return of American Horror Story to FX for its sixth season has sent the cable network’s social media response into the stratosphere.
Canvs, the language analytics company, took a look at the past two weeks of social media response to FX programming to uncover what’s been driving the most emotional response from viewers, and overwhelmingly it’s the latest installment of Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk’s horror anthology series.
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Of the 250,064 Emotional Reactions (ERs) sparked on Twitter by FX shows from Sept. 9-22, 85.5% came from the first two episodes in season 6 of AHS, a.k.a. American Horror Story: Roanoke.
The opening episode on Sept. 14 generated 172,530 ERs, with an average of 288 reactions pouring in per minute. The top ERs sparked by AHS were “excited” (20.4%), “love” (16.0%), “afraid” (11.6%) and “mindblown” (5.9%).
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#AHSFX IM SO HYPE
— mikaili (@ROLLTIDEDOLAN) September 15, 2016
For the first time in a long time, American Horror Story blew me away
— chuck fenner (@chfenner) September 15, 2016
In regard to the second episode, Canvs saw 41,190 ERs coming from 24,913 unique reacting authors. And although “Chapter 2” saw a decline in emotional engagement — a drop-off is inevitable for any show going from its season opener to its second episode — when paired with the season premiere, it helped FX secure the top spot in Emotional Reactions for all TV series across networks, accounting for 9.4% of all ERs detected by Canvs over the two weeks measured.
