I Am Not Convinced We Need This Ryan Murphy Ratched Prequel, but We're Getting It Anyway

Is there any part of history/literature/horror/my anxiety dreams Ryan Murphy won’t touch? Seems like not!

Hence, I assume, why we’re getting Ratched, a Murphy-ed standalone series centering on Nurse Ratched, who made life hell for everyone in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (book and movie). Sarah Paulson’s playing a prequel version of Big Nurse, because of course she is—Indiewire reports that her costars include Cynthia Nixon, Sharon Stone, Finn Wittrock, Jon Jon Briones, Judy Davis, and Charlie Carver.

Set in post-WWII 1947 (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is set in the late 1950s), Ratched follows a young Nurse Ratched as she starts working at a psychiatric hospital in Northern California, one where “where unsettling experiments have begun on the human mind.” Somewhere along the way, Ratched takes it, uh, too far, and considering book Ratched was a manipulative, dehumanizing, lobotomizing monster, I can only imagine how Murphy amps it up.

I do not know if this is truly the moment for electroshock torture porn, but perhaps it’s just because I’m personally only able to watch videos of swimming otters these days, who can say. Either way, Ratched drops on Netflix on September 18.