A sweaty Darren Criss in nothing but white y-fronts jigging around a millennial-pink motel room to Phil Collins’ ‘Easy Lover’: it’s a cheery prospect, pretty much designed for re-posts on Tumblr.

Yet Criss’s manic energy is the product of his American Crime Story character, Andrew Cunanan, torturing an older man.

With every languid hop Cunanan takes, his victim drifts closer to death. There’s not been such a sadistic visual set to a lurid 1980s banger since Christian Bale went to town on Jared Leto with an axe to a soundtrack of Huey Lewis and the News in 1999’s American Psycho.

Whether the pink motel room encounter, in episode two of The Assassination of Gianni Versace, actually happened has been questioned in plenty of fact-checking blogs. The Versace family, who branded the miniseries “a work of fiction” and criticised its basis in Maureen Orth’s book Vulgar Favours, must be pleased such blogs exist. But there is a bigger problem.

Though the title character, played by Edgar Ramirez, is portrayed as a sweet, loyal and hard-working man, the series follows the serial killer far more closely than the person whose name the series trades off.

Cunanan is the show’s most exciting character. Casting-wise, it’s a double win – Criss’s Filipino-Caucasian heritage matches Cunanan’s, and in the role he charms and frightens in equal measure.

That charm isn’t played up for telly: Cunanan was known to many as a slick operator who decorated his humdrum background with lies, pretended to be anyone but himself and, as an avid social climber, meticulously researched his suitors/victims so he knew exactly how to win them over.

His chutzpah isn’t only endearing to the characters he encounters as the series unfolds chronologically backwards, though: to the viewer, there’s something enviably daring about Cunanan lying his way into a life of luxury. When he does break for a second to tell the truth, admitting to a random guy in a noisy club that he’s a “serial killer”, it neatly mirrors American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman hiding in plain sight as he tells a woman in a noisy VIP room that he works “in murders and executions”.

After so many lies, that boldness, that “Come and get me if you think you’re hard enough” tone is refreshing. But any viewer unimpressed by that – coming off the back of four murders – might still be won over by the series’ depiction of Cunanan’s naivety and fragility.

When we discover his annoying mum and the struggles he had growing up in relative poverty, it’s – though we hate to say it – easy to sympathise with Cunanan. He simply wants the good life sold to him by the glossy Versace-adorned magazines he sneakily reads instead of doing his deadbeat retail job. But is it acceptable to invite us to sympathise with a monster?

It’s true we see the domestic abuse Cunanan meted out against his own mother (important, because it both happened in real life and is a sad and often silent forebear of many real-life mass-killings). But the camera lingers on his tears, not hers, and because the incident arrives far too late in the series it’s simply not as shocking as it should be.

On a point of indisputable artistic licence, The Assassination of Gianni Versace shows Cunanan as far more beautiful than he actually was. Cunanan wasn’t ugly and certainly used his beauty to disarm, but Criss is prettier, and harder-bodied. Even when he’s meant to be on crack he looks gorgeous.

Though the clothes Cunanan wears were considered uncool even just a few years ago, the cyclical nature of fashion – this is a series apparently about a fashion designer, after all – means that his thin-wire frame glasses, high-waisted jeans, tucked-in polo shirts, high socks, practical white sneakers and even the aforementioned Y-fronts, are pretty on-trend in 2018.

But condemning the show for glamorising a killer is perhaps simplistic.

Putting Cunanan front and centre might actually have a positive impact beyond salacious titillation, reminding the audience that this story is about so much more than Versace himself. Audiences were drawn in by the promise of Penelope Cruz as Donatella Versace and Ricky Martin as Gianni’s lover Antonio D’Amico, after all, not the impending layers of analysis of what it meant to be a gay man in post-AIDS America.

Though we get peeks into Versace’s life, they’re smartly tethered to the other characters. We see how coming out in fashion isn’t unlike coming out in the military. We see Donatella, encouraged by her brother to dress up in bondage-like leather and chains to sell herself, figuratively, to the fashion world, while Cunanan begins selling himself, literally, to older men.

By following Cunanan’s story, we get to see the lives of all his victims, who were destroyed not only by him, but by the homophobia festering within the police, government and American society at large. The story, as the producers have framed it, is as much about the ridiculous social framework that Cunanan was allowed to operate within, as it is the ridiculousness of Cunanan himself.

Darren Criss told Digital Spy exclusively: “It’s pretty clear cut on the moral spectrum where we stand, so I don’t think it glamourises [him]. If anything, it just begs the question of, ‘How do we get here? How does this happen?’ I don’t think it’s glamourising so much as investigating. You know how the story goes, but it’s the why and the how that makes us rethink what we see in front of us.”

So it’s for the best The Assassination of Gianni Versace took artistic licence with the image of the man who killed a bunch of people – rather than the man whose most outlandish move was to shock and awe the world of fashion with his beautiful designs.

With each episode, we are drawn more under Cunanan’s spell, courtesy of Criss’s stellar performance. That, the show is telling us, is why Versace died in the first place: because Cunanan managed to charm – and harm – so many others before him. What it’s also telling us – under the radar – is how he got away with it for so long.

American Crime Story: Versace has a dark problem