[…] The Assassination of Gianni Versace, based on Vanity Fair contributor Maureen Orth’s Vulgar Favors, is the most extravagant entry to date in FX’s American Crime Story franchise (Fellini, American-style). The first installment opens with the shooting of the mercurial fashion designer (played by Edgar Ramírez) at the gates of his Miami Beach estate by Andrew Cunanan (Darren Criss), a heat-seeking, fame-craving psychopath, the camera propelled as if adopting the P.O.V. in a first-person-shooter video game. So stylized and iconized that it seems custom-made for replay on an endless art-snuff loop, Versace’s murder didn’t carry the jolt of a life prematurely taken—it tolled the fulfillment of a reckoning preordained, the fatal final collision of a fashion emperor and an envious castoff. Given the extravagance of Versace’s kingly lifestyle, the mini-series couldn’t be expected to practice tasteful frugality, but nine episodes seems a lot of time, money, and scrutiny to expend on a punk whose sole claim to notoriety were the corpses he left behind, even if the series does posit him as the poster child for the dark side of the American Dream.

Murder, So Rote: How True Crimes and Traumas Are Endlessly Mined for Your Viewing Pleasure