The first season centers around a family in a haunted house and the over-the-top "eventful" history behind it, it feels like American Beauty with a lot of scary ideas and domestic issues, but without any character development or any logic. American Horror Story: Asylum is just like that, except, it works better focusing on this 1960's Catholic institution for the criminally insane. Every resident in the nuthouse can potentially be the main focus and the setting is more suitable and believable to host a lot of strange events.
This time, we have the authoritative and scary Sister Jude (played by Jessica Lange) running the facility, the righteous Dr. Thredson (played by Zachary Quinto) trying to help, a lesbian reporter (played by Sarah Paulson) aiming for a Pulitzer Prize, an innocent killer Kit (played by Evan Peters) and a lot more in the house, and each character has a somewhat serious backstory. But you won't learn much about them to care because there is a lot more things stuffed in one episode: masked serial killer, exorcism, Frankenstein-ish zombie-like creatures, Saw-like tortures, Prison Break plans, Schindler's List Black-and-white WWII scenes, and even aliens!
Season one still pretends to be a domestic drama in the disguise of a horror genre, but season two just wants to fill up each single scene with scary moment, and each episode is one weird thing after another that we've seen a hundred times before. Combining elements in every single horror genre does not mean real suspense or tension, but it does create enough shock-value to keep us entertained and wanting more. It is like a horror movie marathon where the story steals or cramps all the iconic horror moment into each episode with no rest.
We sometimes laugh at its theatrics, like the Psycho-esque shower scene in episode two (see picture on right). I was also moved by the backstories of the lonely characters and how they come to end up in the asylum. However, the show is anything but serious. Its tone is jumpy - one moment you have Sister Jude having a serious reflection of her guilt, and the next moment, two patients are having sex in the kitchen. The mystery is forced into the show and pieced together, and it is suffocating because that happens every 5 - 10 minutes. As my friend, B, said, "it's a parody of all the horror movies." Thankfully, we are not bored of it, yet. 
