Was Versace an Afterthought in Crime Story?
Question: Now that Season 2 of FX’s American Crime Story has concluded, it is more than apparent that Ryan Murphy didn’t have enough material about Versace to cover the entire season, let alone one episode. If he was to delete the scenes about Andrew Cunanan and just focus on Versace’s life and tragic death. the show would be much less watchable to me. Most of the parts dealing with Gianni Versace, his sister and lover were auite dull. Conversely the parts (thankfully the vast majority of the series) dealing with Andrew Cunanan were spectacular and highly addictive. Overall, I grade the series an A- or 4 and a half out of 5. — Fred
Matt Roush: My magazine review (covering the first eight of nine episodes) gave the series four out of five stars, so we’re pretty much on the same page. (I’d give the remarkable Darren Criss as Cunanan five stars or more.) We’ve covered some of this ground before, but now that the entire series has aired, I feel I need to point out that the title aside (The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story), the psychopathy of Andrew Cunanan was always the primary focus of this project, but it would never have been made—and Cunanan would have been a footnote in the annals of true crime—if he hadn’t selected this famous, unwitting target. Producing a biography of Gianni Versace was never this series’ intent, and while those scenes certainly lacked the drama and intensity of Cunanan’s delusional reign of terror, I appreciated the contrast between the openly gay man who earned his fame and was loved, and the twisted, tormented poseur who used his sexuality for the most debased purposes. I also was quite moved in the final episode by the tragedy of Ricky Martin’s character, the widowed Antonio, who even in a supposedly progressive industry like fashion was sidelined by the family (and, less surprisingly, shunned by a priest at the funeral).
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