Last year, before the first season of American Horror Story was over, I put Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk’s bananas bloodbath on my annual Cincies list of series that were flawed but impressively ambitious. The season ended strong as the Glee producers — well, gleefully — killed off nearly the entire cast of characters. They started again with American Horror Story: Asylum, an even darker, loopier and yet more coherent screamer set in a Catholic home for the criminally insane in the 1960s. Religion, Nazis, vivisection, serial killing, alien abductions — Asylum piles on horror tropes and themes like toppings on a novelty ice-cream dish (a sundae bloody sundae). But its gothic lunacy is anchored by a top-shelf cast — James Cromwell and Jessica Lange especially — and it even manages to work in some serious themes of feminism, science and faith. Asylum, consider me committed. (FX)