3. The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story Network: FX Last Week’s Ranking: 2
Last week’s emotional heavyweight “House by the Lake” focused on the psychological torture and eventual murder of architect David Madson (Cody Fern). But the hint is that the killer of Gianni Versace (Edgar Ramierez), Andrew Cunanan (Darren Criss), got to Madson via Jeff Trail (Finn Wittrock), the man he bludgeons with a hammer in the first minutes of the episode, so we’ve been primed to expect this week’s installment to take us back to how Trail got wrapped up in this horrible spiderweb. The fifth episode of American Crime Story’s second season is the first not to have an actual murder in it, but trust me, it’s doesn’t make anything less painful: “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” is a layered meditation on uniforms and conformity, masks and unmaskings. It moves back and forth in time in a way that’s easy to track but a little hard to describe; there’s a logic to this episode that poets will recognize. It turns on symbol and metaphor at least as much as plot, and it has a lot of layers of commentary on… well, on the nature of identity, when you get down to brass tacks. —AmyGlynn
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