If Ryan Murphy’s goal with the second season of AMERICAN CRIME STORY was to demonstrate the breadth of the show’s anthology branding, not just in subject matter but in style and structure–unlike the relative consistency of his American Horror Story, with its repertory company of writers and stars–well, mission accomplished. Murphy handed the keys of THE ASSASSINATION OF GIANNI VERSACE to Tom Rob Smith, previously best known for London Spy, a purported thriller that was much more interested in the sexuality of its characters than in its own plot. Smith, who personally wrote all 9 episodes of Assassination(co-writing one of them) delivered an idiosyncratic rumination on the subject of Versace’s killer Andrew Cunanan that couldn’t have been farther from the provocative but straightforward history of the wildly successful The People Vs. OJ Simpson.
Smith adopted the kind of backwards structure mostly familiar from Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along and Pinter’s Betrayal (and a famous episode of Seinfeld). After beginning with the events surrounding Cunanan’s murder of Versace, each episode went farther back into Cunanan’s past (and occasionally–seemingly randomly–into Versace’s), until the next-to-last episode reached Cunanan’s childhood. Although Smith didn’t shy away from the grisliness of Cunanan’s murders, as the killer became younger and less dangerous with each hour, the effect was to make Cunanan something of a sympathetic figure, the victim of a terrible childhood dominated by a deceitful, demanding father (with whatever hints of molestation the FX legal department would allow), and then of the life of a gay man in the 1990s.
Or at least that seemed to be the intended effect. The shortcoming of Smith’s approach was that Cunanan, as played by a dogged Darren Criss, wasn’t nearly interesting enough to sustain what must have been well over 10 hours of television once FX’s lax approach to running times was factored in. In each episode, Cunanan told fantasy-driven lies about himself, and lashed out violently, and that pathology wasn’t nearly as fascinating as Smith needed it to be. The colorful supporting cast, which included Edgar Martinez as Versace, Penelope Cruz and Ricky Martin as his sister and lover, and Judith Light as the widow of one of Cunanan’s closeted victims, were doled out in bits and pieces, with Criss at the center throughout, unable to provide shadings to Cunanan that weren’t in Smith’s scripts.
With nowhere further back to go in Cunanan’s story but to the womb, tonight’s finale, directed by Daniel Minahan, finally returned to Assassination‘s present tense, but it was mostly yet another showcase for Criss. The episode was titled “Alone,” and much of the time we watched Cunanan watch his own manhunt on television, from actual news footage to a very on-the-nose scripted segment in which Light’s character, in an appearance on a telemarketing channel, seemed to speak directly to Cunanan’s longing to be “special” and to have the approval of his father. By the time Cunanan stuck a gun in his mouth and blew his own head off, the season’s themes were hammered in, with guest star Max Greenfield returning to give a set-piece speech to the police about the difference between rich gay men like Versace and the suffering proletariat, and Martin’s character attempting suicide when his status as Versace’s putative husband was ignored by all at and after the funeral.
Where People vs OJ raised questions not just about race, but gender bias, popular culture, class and the criminal justice system, and did so with consistent wit and a vivid set of characters, Assassination was long-winded and monotonous. (USA’s current Unsolved is a more worthy successor to the People vs OJcrown.) The ratings, while not awful, reflected the difference, heavily down from the series’ first installment.
Next up (maybe): Murphy’s already long-postponed story of Hurricane Katrina, which seems like an even less likely fit for the American Crime Story package. After Assassination, it’s impossible to tell what that one may look like.
Ryan Murphy’sAmerican Crime Story ended its second season on Wednesday night, bringing with it the conclusion to The Assassination of Gianni Versace. After a season’s worth of reverse chronology, the series snapped back to the aftermath of Versace’s death at the hands of Cunanan, followed his devastated family — including sister Donatella and lover Antonio — as they prepared to bury him, while also portraying the suddenly-urgent manhunt that (eventually) tracked Cunanan to the house boat he’d been hiding out on. Versace’s star studded funeral preceded Cunanan’s self-inflicted end, closing out the series on a rather operatic note.
So, not to paraphrase Aaron Sorkin to intentionally or anything, but: what kind of season has it been? Quantitatively, The Assassination of Gianni Versace has underperformed relative to the 2016 juggernaut The People vs. O.J. Simpson. This is true in both ratings and reviews. O.J. averaged 3.29 million viewers per episode, while Versace has averaged 1.09 mil; O.J. scored a 96 from Rotten Tomatoes and a 90 on Metacritic, while Versace did slightly worse at 86 and 74, respectively. Moreover, you can just feel it in the conversations, or lack thereof, in the media. The People vs. O.J. Simpson was a phenomenon. The nation was going through a national re-experiencing of the Simpson scandal, with a competing documentary on ESPN countless retrospectives. We followed every cigarette Sarah Paulson lit up as Marcia Clark, remembered every tertiary character as they crossed our screen, and stayed riveted even though we all knew how it would end. That treatment didn’t extend to The Assassination of Gianni Versace, and at least in this viewer’s opinion, it’s not because it was a major drop-off in quality.
Part of it we can chalk up to unavoidable factors. The murder of fashion designer Gianni Versace by serial killer Andrew Cunanan in the summer of 1997 was an infamous piece of tabloid news, but it didn’t come close to approaching the levels of notoriety that the O.J. Simpson trial got. That was a national soap opera that lasted well over a year and incorporated dozens of side characters who we all had tucked away in the recesses of our memories, ready for American Crime Story to unearth them. The Versace murder was not like that. We knew about the victim and the killer, and if you managed to read Maureen Orth’s book Vulgar Favors (upon which Murphy and writer Tom Rob Smith based Versace), you knew about a few more. But there were no Kato Kaelins or F. Lee Baileys or Mark Fuhrmans to be found. The People vs. O.J. Simpson was great because it tackled the racial, societal, media, and entertainment angles of the Simpson case and made us all re-examine it through new eyes. But it was popular, in large part, because it let the rapidly fracturing and fragmenting American audience re-experience something we had all watched together. That was not a card that the Versace series could play. (If anything, the closest we got to an O.J.-style sensation in the last year was the Harding/Kerrigan revival that accompanied I, Tonya.)
But I think part of it was also that Versace failed the expectation game for a lot of viewers. In tackling the Versace murder under his American Crime Story banner, Murphy unavoidably promised a certain level of over-the-top camp and kitschiness. For all of O.J.‘s raves and respect from the critical community, it still delivered winking scenes with the Kardashians and Connie Britton as Faye Resnick explaining the finer points of the Brentwood Hello. Versace seemed to be promising something similar just by virtue of its cast, including Glee‘s prep-school heartthrob going against type as Andrew Cunanan and out gay pop hunk Ricky Martin as Versace’s longtime beau. And by casting the role of Donatella — by far the campiest character in this story’s orbit — with Academy Award-winner Penelope Cruz, Murphy seemed to be tacitly promising something at least a little bit gaudy.
Viewers hoping for the operatic, quasi-campy version of The Assassination of Gianni Versace could probably have just watched the first and last episodes and have been satisfied. Those are the episodes that feel most like the kind of show people were expecting. The decadent Versace lifestyle, the soapy intrigue surrounding Donatella and Antonio’s prickly relationship, the did-they-or-didn’t-they recreations of an imagined past encounter between Versace and Cunanan, and ultimately Andrew Cunanan stalking around the perimeter of Gianni Versace’s gilded lifestyle and destroying everything in the process. Smash those two episodes together, watch them like a TV movie, let Penelope Cruz in mourning snatch all your wigs off, and you’ll be good.
But what made The Assassination of Gianni Versace such a special season of television was what came in between those first and last episodes. That was where Murphy and Smith stepped away from the glitz and glamour and celebrity and camp and peered into the darker recesses of Andrew Cunanan’s story. The story that they sketch out, sometimes via firsthand accounts, sometimes via speculation, ultimately tells a sinister but deeply grounded story about he corrosive effects of homophobia. How the closet shames and warps; how institutional homophobia silences gay victims and inadvertently abets their killers; how the twin prisons of masculinity and status can wreak havoc on so many lives. The story in these middle episodes pretty much set aside the likes of Penelope Cruz and Ricky Martin so they could tell a story about tortured soldiers, frightened sons, prideful widows, and, yes, the making of a murderer. The result was some of the most restrained work of Murphy’s prolific career. And maybe that was the problem.
You can’t know for sure, of course. Nobody sends in a signed affidavit to the network when they choose not to watch something. But when ratings for Versace began to dip much lower than O.J., I had to wonder about Ryan Murphy’s traditionally robust FX audiences. Whether they were happy to watch Murphy’s queer extravaganzas when they were put into the service of grotesque horror stories and dishy tabloid tales about actresses’ animosities, but backed away when he decided to shine a more sober spotlight on the cruel homophobia of the not-very-distant past. Happy to watch Finn Wittrock camp it up as a queer-coded killer but not as a victim of the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell bureaucracy. Andrew Cunanan was a queer killer too, of course, but his killings offered no catharsis nor campy thrill. The killings were sad or brutal or unnecessarily cruel. O.J. Simpson got away with murder, but the circus was still pretty fun to watch. Not as much fun to be had here.
So, again, maybe Versace was never meant to catch fire in the culture the way that O.J. did. Maybe in an alternate universe, the Gianni-and-Donatella Fashion Hour told the story of the building of an empire that was cut down by a queer monster. By deciding to peel back the face of that queer monster and stare into the void inside, Murphy and Smith delivered a show that was much darker, though ironically no less illuminating, that the first American Crime Story season. Here’s hoping that with all the possibilities that suddenly lay before him, Ryan Murphy doesn’t take the relative quiet of season 2 as a reason to stay away from this kind of storytelling.
Without its clarifying finale, the aims of American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace were almost as hard to unpack as the lies of its protagonist, serial killer and pathological fabulist Andrew Cunanan. That might, in fact, be exactly the point. The series I once criticized for its roaming point of view ended by lying as freely and charmingly as its dancing villain. In so doing, it forged an unlikely and uncomfortable alliance with Cunanan himself.
It’s no secret that, as a series, Versace mixed truth with half-truths and lies almost as much as Cunanan did. Vulture has run a great fact-checking column for each episode that itemizes the liberties the show takes with the truth. The question, to my mind, was how to interpret those departures. When showrunner Tom Rob Smith swapped in an entire ham (with a knife sticking out of it) for the famous ham sandwich Cunanan left behind at the Miglin residence (after having brutally murdering the owner), it seemed clear to me that once we understood that substitution — that blindingly literal instance of the show “hamming it up” — we’d understand a lot of what the series was doing.
What it’s doing, it turns out, is experimenting with narrative identification. And identification is a lot of what this show was actually about: not gender identification, not sexual identification, but empathic identification: who gets it and who doesn’t. Back in 1997, while gauging local reaction to the murders in the area where Cunanan lived and studied, Matthew Lickona reported the following exchange between his wife — who asked about the response in La Jolla — and a La Jolla resident:
“No, he’s from Hillcrest,” he corrected her. “That’s where all the gays are. Nobody in this town is concerned about him at all, because we don’t identify with him.” [The San Diego Reader]
Versace makes you identify with him. It dispenses with that craven, manufactured distinction. It condemns the American indifference to gay deaths around which much of the series is structured. And, however much it sympathizes with his victims (and it does), the series also insists on respecting Cunanan’s fervid need for attention even as it ostensibly disciplines it. One of the facts Versace quotes most about Cunanan was that he was voted (depending on the source) “Most Likely to be Remembered” or “Least Likely to be Forgotten” in high school. The series ends by focusing in on a plaque bearing Cunanan’s name. It turns out to be on a vault in a mausoleum — this feels, then, explicitly like an act of remembrance. But as the camera slowly pans out to show more and more other vaults, the effect becomes punitive: The series seems to focus on the stern, equalizing near-anonymity death finally confers.
If that feels like a finger-wagging lesson, the show inverts that once again. The moral should be “Cunanan, who wanted only to be remembered, failed.” Except, of course, that he didn’t fail: The series itself amounts to a massive act of remembrance. The show explicitly named for Versace was actually about Cunanan. If fame was his goal, he lives on, unchastened.
That lesson about mortality, in other words, feels like exactly the kind of empty wisdom Cunanan (or his abusive, charismatic father, Modesto) might impart.
I’ve made no secret of the ethical questions I’ve had about this series, which has presented as fact things that aren’t even remotely confirmed, including the claim that Cunanan and Lee Miglin were sexually involved and the suggestion that Cunanan was molested by his father, Modesto. These are big truths to bend for dramatic effect, and the series did so without a wink or a tremor — just as Cunanan did.
But if the point was to replicate rather than condemn Cunanan’s curious modus operandi, it was a singular success. Paste Magazine’s Matt Brennan was the first to pick up on the show’s investment in forcing this connection to the villain.
It confronts us — scratch that, it confronted me — with a startling implication: That in the suburban upbringing, the shame, the dissembling, the desperate desire not to be a faggot, I might resemble the murderer more than I do the object of his obsession. [Paste Magazine]
Seen this way, the finale parallels Cunanan’s frenzied effort to escape with the show’s own struggle to escape Cunanan’s stranglehold on its narrative sympathies. We watch Cunanan panicking, calling his father, reduced to eating dog food, just as we see the series roving wildly back to its ostensible protagonists: Versace’s sister Donatella (Penelope Cruz) and his lover Antonio (Ricky Martin). But instead of resting with those characters (or giving them the final say), it invents wildly and well. Donatella and Antonio have an extremely painful conversation, we suffer with Antonio as he’s marginalized at Versace’s funeral, and we witness his tragic suicide attempt. None of these details seem to be particularly well-supported — they are Cunanan-isms — and the show can’t help but revert to its charismatic antihero at the end. Even in death, he remains the show’s most compelling character.
This is not a true-crime story at all, then. It’s creative nonfiction in its most creative sense: a portrait of a serial liar that chooses, in the end, to lie with him.
The season began with a murder and ends with a funeral. After diving deep into the troubled life of one Andrew Cunanan (Darren Criss), the final episode of The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story returns us to Miami and the aftermath of the designer’s death. As the FBI organize one of the biggest manhunts to date to try and find the young serial killer, we get to see how the frayed relationship between Donatella and Antonio (Penelope Cruz and Ricky Martin) won’t be mended after all, how Lee Miglin’s widow (Judith Light) has coped with the death of her husband, and how even Andrew’s father has turned his son’s murder spree into an entrepreneurial endeavor.
More importantly, it gave Dascha Polanco’s Detective Lori Wieder even more screen time. A non-nonsense Miami cop who understood just how dangerous Cunanan was (even before he had killed Versace), Detective Wieder emerged over her brief appearances as the kind of law enforcement agent who wasn’t about to let cultural prejudices about gay men get in the way of serving justice. In this episode, when she and her partner go back to interrogate Ronnie (Max Greenfield), she gets to hear Cunanan’s former friend talk at length about why he believes the police and the FBI took so long to even care about his serial killings: “Oh, you were looking for him, weren’t you?” he asks her. “The only lass on the force. But other cops weren’t searching so hard, were they? Why is that? Because he killed a bunch of nobody gays.” It wasn’t Versace’s death made headlines that Wieder’s co-workers began papering the streets with the very signs she’d urged the FBI to print and distribute all around South Beach weeks earlier.
One of the joys of watching American Crime Story this season has been witnessing Latino actors the likes of Edgar Ramirez (as Gianni Versace) and Ricky Martin (as his lover, Antonio) getting plum roles in one of cable TV’s hottest show. But right alongside them we should add Polanco. Whether playing Jennifer Lawrence’s best friend in Joy (alongside Ramirez) or showing up in a bit part in the Adam Sandler comedy The Cobbler, Polanco is proving there’s more to her than the once-mousy-turned-hardened inmate Daya in Netflix’s hit series Orange is the New Black. Moreover, it’s always nice to see a stellar Latina actress get a chance to shine in roles that play to their strengths and refuse to merely box them into playing what they’ve played before.
Sadly, even as Wieder and her colleagues try to find a peaceful resolution to the Cunanan ordeal, the explosive final moments of the season finale show how we all know the story ended: with the serial killer shooting himself in the head after being cornered in a house boat by police and FBI alike. “Andrew is not hiding,” Ronnie tells Wieder, when he explains the flashy murders of the young man he still doesn’t feel comfortable calling a friend, “He’s trying to be seen.” His death, which like Versace’s, could’ve been prevented if the homophobic bias of Wieder’s fellow cops wasn’t so pervasive, becomes a final ode to the kind of infamous fame Cunanan sought. It’s a fitting end (which whisks us off to Italy where Gianni’s star-studded funeral took place) to this sun-kissed drenched exposé on 90s homophobia, which brimmed with explorations on the closet, self-hatred, self-delusions, and plenty of Darren Criss’ rocking bod. But before we bid the show goodbye, we wanted to tally up some of our favorite recurring motifs we kept looking forward to week after week. Enjoy!
The Final Counts:
– Times We Saw Ricky Martin in a Speedo (and out of one): 👙🍑
– Times Dascha Polanco Side-Eyed Her Co-Workers: 👀 👀 👀 👀
– Times Penelope Cruz Exhaled in Exasperation: 😤 😤 😤 😤 😤 😤
– Times Edgar Ramirez Stares at a Design On A Mirror: 👗 👗 👗
– Times Cruz and Martin Had a Melodramatic Quarrel: 😡 😡 😡 😡
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