American Crime Story: The Assassination Of Gianni Versace
9pm, BBC Two
As this astonishing series nears its end, it gets even more brain scrambling. It’s the penultimate episode, and the backwards-running structure stretches back to its furthest points, to offer two parallel, contrasting portraits of childhood, in two different timeframes. In 1957, we glimpse the young Gianni Versace, aged 10 or so, and encouraged by his dressmaker mother to follow his heart and learn about and designing clothes, despite the taunts of other kids and disapproval of his teachers. Flipping forward to 1980 comes a fuller and more unsettling picture of Andrew Cunanan around the same age – singled out for special treatment and pressurised to succeed by his father, Modesto, a stockbroker with big dreams, and given to making big exaggerations about himself. As Cunanan becomes a young man, however, the house of cards Modesto has built begins to collapse. Darren Criss’s performance as Cunanan is extraordinary again, while the casting of the child actor playing young Cunanan (Edouard Holdener) is spooky.
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