Ten points for Gryffindor if you know Lady Gaga's real name.
That's assuming you know who Lady Gaga is. Not everyone keeps up with Grammy-winning singer/songwriters who also produce records, act, and are philanthropists.
And you must know her full name to get all 10 points. The answer is at the bottom of today's column.
In her earlier career, the 29-year-old Gaga may have been best known for her wildly inventive (or outrageous) avant-garde costumes. My personal favorite is the dress she wore to the 2010 MTV Video Music Awards made entirely of raw meat.
For the curious, that meat dress has been preserved as jerky and is on display, along with her meat shoes, in a humidity-controlled case at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland.
Perhaps the bizarre outfits were just a way to get noticed. Gaga certainly has the talent, but it's sometimes hard to stand out in the crowd.
That won't be the problem when Gaga heads the ensemble for the latest season of Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk's FX anthology series American Horror Story. The 13-episode Season 5, American Horror Story: Hotel, arrives at 9 p.m. Wednesday.
Hide the kids. Lock the doors. Check under the bed.
I'll also assume there are a number of readers unfamiliar with the frequently grisly AHS. FX is basic cable, after all, so the total audience isn't astronomical. Season 3 averaged 4 million viewers, and last season drew 3.85 million.
By comparison, the Season 5 finale of AMC's The Walking Dead earned an incredible 15.8 million viewers.
Despite the smaller number of total viewers, AHS has won 13 Emmys out of 70 nominations. Last season (Freak Show) was the most nominated so far with 19. It won five, but all were in the Creative Arts division.
Each AHS season is its own self-contained miniseries, but there have been several actors appearing in multiple roles and seasons. This will be the first season without series stalwart Jessica Lange.
Here's a quick American Horror Story recap.
Murder House (Season 1). Set in Los Angeles in 2011, the first season followed a family (Dylan McDermott, Connie Britton, Taissa Farmiga) that moved into a haunted house.
Asylum (Season 2). It's 1964 and we visited an institution for the criminally insane in Massachusetts. Lange played the warden.
Coven (Season 3). It was witches vs. voodoo in this tale set in 2013 New Orleans that followed the descendants of those who survived the Salem witch trials.
Freak Show (Season 4). The season took place in 1952 Jupiter, Fla., and revolved around one of the last remaining circus freak shows.
Here's an overview of the cast and characters for Hotel.
Lady Gaga plays Elizabeth/the Countess, a wealthy socialite and owner of the spooky downtown Los Angeles Hotel Cortez.
Finn Wittrock (AHS: Freak Show) is Tristan Duffy, an oversexed male model.
Cheyenne Jackson (30 Rock) portrays fashion icon Will Drake, who moves from New York to creatively reinvent himself.
Dennis O'Hare (True Blood) plays a cross-dressing character named Liz Taylor who works in the hotel bar.
Jonesboro native Wes Bentley (American Beauty) and Chloe Sevigny (Big Love) play married couple John and Alex Lowe. He is a police homicide detective investigating the Ten Commandments Killer, and she is a pediatrician.
Matt Bomer (White Collar) is Donovan, one of the hotel's residents.
Angela Bassett (AHS: Coven, Freak Show) plays Ramona Rowell, an actress and former lover of the Countess who frequently visits the hotel.
Kathy Bates (Misery; AHS: Coven, Freak Show) plays Iris, the hotel manager and Donovan's mother.
Sarah Paulson (AHS: Murder House, Asylum, Coven, Freak Show) plays drug-addicted hotel resident Hypodermic Sally and Iris' nemesis.
Max Greenfield (New Girl) portrays Gabriel, a Hollywood junkie.
There will be others, but these are the main folks.
So, what's going on at the Hotel Cortez? The first scene sets the stage. Bentley is shown settling down for a brief rest. The camera pans slowly down and we find a body under the bed.
Yikes!
And I won't give away what, exactly, the Countess is, I'll just let Murphy tease. About the premiere, E! quotes Murphy as saying, "When you see that first episode when [Lady Gaga] comes on the screen, she has this incredible, magnetic thing that you can't create. You either have it or you don't. And she has it."
During the TV critics summer press tour, Murphy said Hotel would remind fans of Murder House, in that it "hearkens back to the first season and is much more rooted in the honest, primal fears that the first season was."
Finally, the answer to the question, "What is Lady Gaga's real name?" It's Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta.
The diminutive Gaga (5-foot-1) has been quoted by several sources as saying that former boyfriend Rob Fusari, a music producer, coined her stage name from the 1984 Queen song "Radio Ga Ga."
The TV Column appears Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. Email:
mstorey@arkansasonline.com
Style on 10/06/2015