TV HUNTER: ‘Assassination of Gianni Versace’ a chilling, perplexing saga

Andrew Cunanan would probably have taken a sense of pride in even being mentioned in the same sentence as O.J. Simpson.

Not much connected the two men in the late 1990s except their involvement in crimes that shocked and fascinated the country in equal measure. The latter was a towering public figure who’s trial in the murders of his ex-wife and her friend ignited racial and judicial conversations that still linger today; while the former was a 27-year-old, fame-hungry nobody who’s name is remembered by history because of his fifth and final victim: iconic fashion designer Gianni Versace.

The two men are also the subjects of seasons one and two of FX’s crime anthology series “American Crime Story,” but now we know even that connection is a bit flimsy.

Save for the title they share, the dramatic recreations of each man’s story are astoundingly different in everything from storytelling to emotional tone, so much so some viewers may refer to their channel guide to ensure they’re watching the right show when “The Assassination of Giant Versace” premieres 10 p.m. Wednesday.

“The People V. O.J. Simpson,” which debuted in February 2016 and went onto sweep every award show it was eligible for, stunningly intertwined commentaries on race’s role in the trial of the century and its infamously divisive verdict; the misogyny that besieged prosecutor Marcia Clark; the nation’s obsession with the case; and the media’s thirst to deliver every second of it.

Its story largely existed in a courtroom after the crime and within the bounds of the judicial system. But “The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story” takes a starkly divergent approach, one that is sometimes brilliantly engaging and just as often convoluted.

First, here are the facts. In July 1997, Versace, the renowned and beloved designer who became an icon for the gay community, was shot and killed on the steps of his Miami Beach mansion by Cunanan, a wayward creep, charismatic opportunist and compulsive liar who had previously killed four other men, three of whom were possible lovers.

The second “ACS” opens with a sweeping intricately paced, classically scored and nearly silent ballet of sorts that culminates in the titular killing. From there, the show almost exclusively shifts into reverse, using subsequent episodes to work backward to see how Cunanan arrived at Versace’s doorstep, offering parallels in their lives along the way.

Although the title would suggest this is an account of Versace’s murder, this is never his story.

By episode two, it becomes clear, despite how the show is marketed, this story belongs to the man pulling the trigger: Andrew Cunanan, played with a menacingly detached disposition by “Glee” alum Darren Criss.

Admittedly, Criss’ performance takes some getting used to, as does the character of Cunanan. He’s devoid of empathy and therefore lacks social norms that would make him easy to understand. He’s creepy from the moment you meet him, a trait that only intensifies the divide between the character and reality. He’s sadistically violent and craves attention. He’s annoyingly charming and manipulative to make his way in the world in spite of having just pennies to his name.

At first, it doesn’t seem as though Criss is strong enough of an actor to balance the manic overcompensation or reserved demeanor that Cunanan alternates between. But as the show progresses and it more squarely falls on his shoulders, it begins to blur whether Criss’ acting is actually more calculated in capturing Cunanan’s truly disturbing psychosis or if his limitations are simply disguised underneath the weight of it – a question I think is better left unanswered and works in Criss’ favor.

Up until now, Criss was best known for playing Blaine, the heartthrob a capella crooner on “Glee,” created by “ACS” executive producer Ryan Murphy (who does some stunning direction in “Versace’s” first two episodes). But tackling Cunanan is more in line with his gonzo stint as Hedwig in “Hedwig and the Angry Inch” on Broadway, a character more akin to an emotional ticking time bomb. Wherever you come down on the performance, Criss bears the brunt of this show and deserves his due.

Curiously, a few episodes of “The Assassination of Gianni Versace” go by without even an appearance or mention of anyone from Versace’s orbit.

Edgar Ramirez stars as the designer destined to meet his tragic end, a flashy role that never quite feels as elevated or important as the legacy of his name would have you believe. Sure, Versace is the reason Cunanan’s crimes got the spotlight they did, but Ramirez doesn’t have much to do in comparison to Criss despite being good in the role.

It’s the scenes of hostility between Penelope Cruz as his demanding sister Donatella, and Ricky Martin as Gianni’s longtime partner Antonio that carry more dramatic substance early on, but even those feel somewhat tame considering the high-class world un which they exist.

Of the trio, Cruz commands the screen most engagingly as a sister broken by the loss of her brother but resolute in her ambition to carry on the family name. With the signature cascading strands of platinum blonde hair and thick accent, she assertively peels back the layers of a woman many know today as the butt of plastic surgery jokes.

Writer Tom Rob Smith based much of the show on the intricately detailed book “Vulgar Favors,” by Maureen Orth. But as it unfurls, the narrative takes sizable detours, the results of which only pull more focus away from thew man in the title.

In an episode devoted entirely to the story of Lee Miglin, a Chicago architect and Cunanan’s third victim, Judith Light is utterly brilliant as the widow whose composure and poise begins to crack under grief. A later episode explores the nightmare of being gay in the military in the age of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” following “American Horror Story” player Finn Whittrock as Jeff Trail, Cunanan’s first victim.

The biggest supporting cast breakout, however, is Cody Fern as David Madson, Cunanan’s most substantial romantic relationship – at least to him. Arguably, Madson was put through the worst psychological hell of any of Cunanan’s victims, giving Fern plenty of time to mine the depths of grief, shock and desperation.

Like “The People V. O.J. Simpson,” “Versace” tries its hand at saying a lot about the social implications that surrounded the crimes, but it stumbles more often than its predecessor.

For example, a case is made early on that hesitation to understand or give validity to gay culture and relationships hindered the manhunt for Cunanan. Seeing as it was the 1990s and society, let alone law enforcement, was still grappling with its feelings about the LGBT community, it’s a fair question to probe. And maybe that is one of the traits that makes this a distinctively American crime story. But the show ultimately drops the ball in making its case, providing evidence like bread crumbs but leaving much of the prosecutorial responsibility up to the audience.

It’s indicative of what ultimately defines “The Assassination of Gianni Versace” as an entertaining, ambitious but perplexing follow-up to “O.J Simpson.”

Having seen eight of the series’ nine episodes, I have no idea what the message of this season is, a strange place to fall after season one’s concise stances on a number of issues. It lives somewhere between the opulent world of Versace and the desire to covet such materialism that drove Cunanan. But maybe a little middle ground is OK.

“The Assassination of Gianni Versace” is not what it’s title would have you believe, but what lies outside the burden of expectation – the unexpected moments on Cunanan’s spree – are what bear the most fruit, whether its ripe or not. In reality, Versace unwittingly gave Cunanan his infamy. But in “ACS,” it’s Cunanan that has the defining story.

Review: FX’s ‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace’ will unnerve you

The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story isn’t what you might expect.

Stylish and vivid, violent and colorful, the newest installment of FX’s American Crime Story anthology series (Wednesday, 10 ET/PT, ★ ★ ★ ½ out of four) is not a courtroom drama like 2016’s The People vs. O.J. Simpson. Nor is it really the story of the death of Gianni Versace, the famed fashion designer who was shot dead on the steps of his Miami Beach villa in 1997.

Instead, the nine-episode series, from executive producers Ryan Murphy and Tom Rob Smith, based on the book Vulgar Favors by Maureen Orth, is the story of serial killer Andrew Cunanan, who claimed Versace as his fifth and final victim. The series spins backward in time, peeling back the layers of one of America’s most enigmatic killers, brought to life with disturbing energy and commitment by Darren Criss, who has decidedly left his wholesome Glee character in the dust.

The series unfolds like the operas for which Versace designed costumes. Its first moments are also Versace’s (Edgar Ramirez) last, as they chronicle the fateful morning when he was shot by Cunanan and mourned by his lover Antonio D’Amico (Ricky Martin) and sister Donatella (Penélope Cruz).

Soon, the series leaves the Versaces behind to focus on Cunanan, occasionally weaving in flashbacks to Gianni’s childhood and ascent to fashion stardom. Whether it’s responsible to give a killer a starring role is never quite examined, at least not in the first eight episodes. Each takes a step backward in Cunanan’s life, including his murders of Lee Miglin (Mike Farrell), David Madson (Cody Fern), Jeff Trail (Finn Wittrock) and William Reese (Gregg Lawrence). And eventually the series travels back to Cunanan’s troubled childhood to decode the man.

Cunanan is a grotesquely fascinating figure, but Versace’s weakness, especially compared to People vs. O.J., is that his life (and death) wasn’t eventful enough to to devote nine episodes. Cunanan’s tale is simpler, with fewer points of view than the O.J. saga. The series’ reverse chronology is captivating, but it occasionally confuses the events in the killer’s life.

Versace zeroes in on the struggles gay people faced in the 1990s, from the police homophobia it argues derailed the manhunt, or a side story about the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy, but some of the moments are too heavy-handed.

However, the series’ strengths lie in its spectacle. Murphy has a knack for grandiosity, and, as with American Horror Story, Versace marries the extravagant with the violent. Even when the series stretches its plot too thin, bold direction mostly makes up for it, ensuring that there is always something to look at, either beautiful or repulsive.

The series is grounded by sublime performances from its cast, led by Criss (and we’re guessing the Emmys will notice); Martin, the singer whose deft and subtle acting skills may surprise viewers who missed him in Spanish-language TV; and Cruz, whose portrayal of Donatella never borders on cartoonish.

Versace will inevitably be compared to People vs. O.J., so it’s better that it stands apart from the earlier Emmy-winning chapter. What it does well, it does extremely well, and its mix of beauty and horror will stick with you long after its episodes conclude.

Review: FX’s ‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace’ will unnerve you

Ryan Murphy on ‘Versace,’ Darren Criss’ Star Turn and the #MeToo Movement

Ryan Murphy is poised to give audiences another jolt of innovative storytelling starting Wednesday with the premiere of FX’s “The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story.”

The producer took time out from “Versace’s” Jan. 8 premiere party at the Hollywood Palladium to speak with Variety about the development of the series and the revelatory performance by series star Darren Criss as killer Andrew Cunanan.

How did you come up with the idea of having the story unfold in a backward-chronological fashion?

The idea of telling the story backwards was [FX CEO John] Landgraf’s. We had written the first two (episodes) and then you go in and talk to John and say, “OK, here’s the story.” We just started talking about the “onion peel” of shame — because really it’s all about shame — and we just started talking narratively about that. The more we talked about it in the room, the more we liked it. We knew that we were following ‘The People V. O.J. Simpson” which is a really difficult thing to do so we have to do everything we can to make it special.

What did that require of you on the production end?

It’s a very hard thing to construct because you have to be uber-prepared. The actors have to be very informed. I liked to work by giving (actors) concentrated information but not giving them much more than that. It was hardest on (writer) Tom Rob Smith and the actors. But it was the question of how do we keep being ambitious, how do we keep challenging ourselves? When you go backward in someone’s trajectory it’s more surprising for the audience and I think the experience is deeper. We tried to make it so that if you watched the show backwards it would be an interesting and oddly symbiotic thing. It’s a narrative device that takes a lot of extra planning, but when it works it’s great.

Darren Criss has drawn mostly rave reviews for his performance, which is very against type for the former “Glee” trouper. What was it that gave you confidence he could handle this role?

It was important to me that we were true to Cunanan’s ethnicity (Filipino and Italian). I had only directed him once (on “Glee”) but we stayed friends. I remember thinking he was a really good dramatic actor. He did something weird once in a “Glee” scene. I told him please don’t lose that excitement, and he never did. He always checked in and checked in with me. I called him when we were ready to greenlight (“Versace”). I wanted Cunanan like Darren to be a discovery for the audience. The interesting thing about Cunanan is you don’t know what he’s capable of and to have the actor in it be on the same powerful journey and I think it is.

Did he have any pause about taking on the role of a spree murderer?

(Darren) really went for it. He studied it, he pushed himself hard. His performance got quieter and more concentrated and studious and I like that. It was powerful to watch. I was not interested in just doing a serial killer story but to track the idea of how does someone become a monster?

How do you think the audience will react?

Darren is reminding me a lot of Sarah Paulson’s trajectory. It was powerful to watch somebody step into adulthood in a way. It’s very rewarding.

With “Versace” you are continuing your commitment to hiring women for at least half of the directing assignments on your show. Your Half Foundation has also been proactive in opening doors for female directors. These initiatives could not be more timely as the #MeToo and Time’s Up movements take root.

Everybody’s talking about it. it’s important. I changed the dynamic of my company. The most important thing is that the culture has changed to be more about ideas and the exchange of ideas than ego. It’s interesting when women direct. The work is better. They ask more people to participate. I’ve been doing this a year and a half. It’s been a really good change in my life. That foundation may be the most important thing I’ve ever done in my career. I’m delighted to just keep going.

Ryan Murphy on ‘Versace,’ Darren Criss’ Star Turn and the #MeToo Movement

You’ll Never Guess Where the Versace Costumes in the Crime Story About Gianni’s Death Are Really From

American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace is easily one of the most anticipated TV shows of 2018—and for good reason. After all, the first installment of the true crime-based anthology series, The People v. O.J. Simpson, swept the Emmys with a whopping nine wins last year. Now, the latest brainchild from creator Ryan Murphy is finally here. Season two of the FX series, which premieres Jan. 17 at 10 p.m., explores the 1997 murder of designer Gianni Versace that shook the fashion world. Edgar Ramirez brings the founder of the Italian fashion house to life onscreen, while Penélope Cruz nails the part of his sister and ultimate successor, Donatella Versace. The show also stars Ricky Martin as Gianni’s scene-stealing lover, Antonio D’Amico. But hands down, the most powerful performance is delivered by Darren Criss, whose downright bone-chilling portrayal of serial killer Andrew Cunanan will be hard for viewers to forget.

The all-star cast is alluring, but impossible to overlook are the costumes they wear. It’s rare for a crime series to be so deeply rooted in fashion. On top of that, the fashion house was decidedly uninvolved with the project, so costume designers Lou Eyrich and Allison Leach had to get creative, turning to resellers online to buy real Versace items from past collections.

For specific looks that played pivotal roles in the show, though—like the black leather bondage dress that Donatella wore on a red carpet in 1993, signaling a new era for the label and establishing herself as a creative force behind the scenes—they had to start from scratch. “We knew we were going to be recreating actual Versace garments, so we did research at the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising here in L.A.,” said Leach. “They have one of the largest Versace collections in the country. In this case, it was researching not only photos and videos and magazines but actually looking at the real clothes and their construction and then recreating that.“

The wardrobe was so expansive that during filming, it was stored in multiple Miami warehouses filled with everything from law enforcement uniforms and college student ensembles specific to each city Cunanan’s killing spree hit. And then there are the looks we see inside the Versace mansion that capture the label’s key ‘90s trends. “Leather played a big part, and so did hardware—the stud-work, the collar tips, and the medusa details,” said Leach. “Gianni is also so famous for his prints. Even a person who doesn’t know much about fashion can still recognize an iconic rococo-pattern Versace shirt inspired by his life growing up in Calabria, Italy. There’s a sense of grandeur to his designs that is very aspirational.”

Scroll down for our full chat with the costume designers, and tune into the premiere of American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace on Wednesday, January 17 at 10 p.m. on FX.

Without access to Versace’s archives, how many actual pieces were you able to find and use for the show?
Lou Eyrich: I’d say half of Penélope’s closet was real.
Allison Leach: The Versace collections are skyrocketing right now on eBayand 1stdibs. The prices are out of control—everything online is in the thousands. And when you have so many clothes to do, you can’t be spending $3,000 on one piece. We were able to use more Versace menswear, like the actual printed shirts and a lot of original jeans and shoes.

Penélope Cruz as Donatella Versace is an epic match. What was it like to help transform her for the role?
LE: Penélope herself was very exact in what she wanted to portray with Donatella. The silhouettes are so important—it was all about the corsets and showing off a tiny waist. The clothes are very body-forming—there’s a lot of body-con.
AL: She also really wanted to project the gravitas of the situation, so she did wear a lot of black, which Donatella did. So then the silhouette becomes even more important, and the details, like the perfect Versace belt. Those details really sell it. Penélope likes to wear Versace in her own life and has tremendous respect for the brand, so whenever we’d find some gem, she would get so excited and say, “Can I keep this?!”

Was there one piece that was absolutely crucial to the series?
LE: I would say the pink robe that Gianni wears in the beginning. It wasn’t actually a Versace piece and we never saw him in anything like it, but it was Ryan Murphy’s vision of him flowing through the casa in Miami in this beautiful pink and gold robe—the opulence of it and the way that it popped throughout the stonewashed white walls of the casa. I think that was our number one mandate from Ryan Murphy was to create this pink robe.
AL: He wanted to capture the sizzle and flow of Miami and have those pops of color that really put us there in the ‘90s.

Which look was your biggest challenge to create?
LE: I would say the bondage dress that our tailor had to create.
AL: It’s such an intricate garment, and to get it to fit the way it does was probably the biggest construction challenge. We had to have three of them made, including one to cut [on-camera].

Any favorite pieces that didn’t make it into the series?
LE: There was a lace dress that our tailor recreated that was really gorgeous on Penélope, the pink safety pin dress [that Penélope wears on the cover of Entertainment Weekly], and a pair of studded pants from the Western collection, but nobody gets to see those.
AL: There are more than 1000 studs on those pants! We’re still weeping.

Of the Versace items that you bought online, what was the biggest score you landed from a past collection?
AL: I remember a day we were crying with joy because we found a black leather fringed shirt for Penélope. It was from the exact year of the Miss S&M bondage period [fall 1992].
LE: Oh, yeah! There were tears that day—and now we have different kind of tears, because that also hit the cutting room floor.

In one episode, we see Donatella and Gianni each styling their own runway models in a sibling fashion face-off. What was it like to recreate that fashion show?
LE: Part of the storyline was Gianni and Donatella fighting, because it was back when all the really thin waif models were coming in. But Gianni wanted his models to have a life about them and have a healthy-looking figure. They were fighting between those looks, and we had 12 models, so we divided them up: 6 to look like Gianni’s models, 6 like Donatella’s.
AL: That fashion show very much represented the turning point in fashion from these happy supermodels with smiles on their faces and swagger in the hips to this more of a waif look. From a creative standpoint, we wanted to show that there was a difference between the Gianni models and the Donatella models. So there were instances of razor sharp black suits and dresses and then also the more colorful pieces and crystal mesh, which Gianni was famous for.

What was it like to work with Ricky Martin? Was he super involved in choosing his looks?
LE: We’re all in love with Ricky! He was pretty much like, “I’m the palette. Just use me.” He didn’t really have an opinion—he loved looking at the research and trying on clothes, but he was like, “You guys are the masters—do your work.”
AL: I’m just glad he got to wear a swimsuit, because he’s got an amazing physique and it looks good in everything. His clothes were a little more body-conscious.

Crime series aren’t usually so fashion-focused. How did the plot affect your process?
AL: It makes it challenging because when there’s murder involved, you need blood multiples [multiple versions of the same looks that will become blood stained]. There was also an undertone of how devastating this story was. That informed choices not just about how the clothes looked but how they felt. We tried to convey the tone.

You’ll Never Guess Where the Versace Costumes in the Crime Story About Gianni’s Death Are Really From

Review | FX’s ‘Assassination of Gianni Versace’ reaches for beauty but can’t find meaning

The twisted, true story of Andrew Cunanan’s 1997 killing spree exists in whatever dark sliver of cultural space remains between lurid and sordid. It dangles just out of satisfying reach, even with all the fresh attention being lavished upon it by Ryan Murphy and company in FX’s watchable yet incrementally disappointing “The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story.”

A stylish but depressing nine-episode tragedy (premiering Wednesday), the series heralds, of course, the much-awaited return of the true-crime anthology that launched two years ago with a marvelously textured retelling of O.J. Simpson’s murder trial.

This time the series (eight episodes of which were made available for review) takes a big swerve into a dead-end story that is far less compelling. Fascinating yet repellent, “The Assassination of Gianni Versace” demonstrates why some celebrity-related crimes acquire lasting notoriety and others just fade away.

The brilliance of “The People v. O.J. Simpson” was how it made a widely famous and well-raked case seem entirely new. The failure of “Versace” is that it takes a case that is at best vaguely remembered (mostly by fashionistas and gay men) and tries to apply to it the same degree of resonance and insight.

Alas, the themes that so easily presented themselves for fresh scrutiny in “People vs. O.J.” (systemic racism and sexism, media manipulation, elusive justice) are far from evident in “The Assassination of Gianni Versace”: Is it about beauty? Is it about psychosis? Is it about gay rights?

Yes to all that, but never effectively. (And why has Versace’s murder been upgraded to an “assassination?” We’ll get back to that.)

It’s far from a total bust, however. As with “People v. O.J.,” the series has that intoxicating mix of reported fact (drawing on Vanity Fair journalist Maureen Orth’s 1999 book “Vulgar Favors” for details) and a dash of invention that now defines the “American Crime Story” style.

“Glee” star Darren Criss is plenty creepy and believable as Cunanan, a 27-year-old charlatan and chronic fibber who mooches off the kindness of strangers. Criss capably holds the series together when the writing and dialogue can’t, particularly in how he portrays the smarmy banality of Cunanan’s evil. Sometimes he’s a charming creep. Sometimes he’s a violent creep. It works like a light switch, and it does get predictable; as such, the scary legend of Cunanan might have better lent itself to a serial-killer season of Murphy’s “American Horror Story.”

In the first episode, Cunanan arrives in Miami in July 1997 and wastes no time locating his ultimate target, the Italian fashion designer Gianni Versace (Édgar Ramírez), who lives in an ornate South Beach mansion. Versace takes a morning stroll to a nearby newsstand to buy a stack of magazines; when he returns to his front gate, Cunanan walks up and shoots him a few times, including a bullet through his face. As the murderer flees, Versace’s longtime companion, Antonio D’Amico (Ricky Martin, crying sufficient soap-opera tears) cradles a dying Versace in his arms.

By night’s end, Versace’s formidable younger sister, the brutally blond Donatella (Penélope Cruz, savoring each snarl) arrives and immediately takes charge of her brother’s empire. Cunanan has fled; Miami police soon learn that the FBI has been pursuing the suspect for weeks, tying him to four other killings.

The episode flashes back and surfs along the quasi-true world of its killer. Among the many falsehoods Cunanan regaled his friends and acquaintances with is the claim of a dalliance with Versace, circa 1990 in San Francisco. True, or not true, or sort of true? If you need to know definitively, with “Law and Order”-like objectivity, then “The Assassination of Gianni Versace” will be tough going. If, on the other hand, you’re tantalized by the fantasies Cunanan created for himself, then carry on.

For sensation’s sake, obviously, “The Assassination of Gianni Versace” has started at what should be its penultimate chapter, with a handsome gunman on the loose and an exquisitely — if grotesquely — displayed corpse in the morgue. Anyone with a search engine (or a good memory) knows that Cunanan never went to trial; he took his own life once the police caught up to him a week later.

In a serious miscalculation of structure and coherence, each episode of “Versace” stutters and skips along a chronology that moves mainly backward, further into Cunanan’s deceits in the 1990s and late ’80s, until it finally arrives (in the eighth episode) at his spoiled yet abusive childhood, marred by his Filipino crook of a father (Jon Jon Briones). Along this same disordered timeline, the show wanly offers a story about Gianni and Donatella’s struggle to keep the House of Versace in the black.

Thus, the Cunanan sequences play like reheated “Dateline” episodes while the Versace scenes are like paging through a stack of old Vogues. Ramírez brings a dour elegance to Versace’s creativity and moods — and one episode somewhat opaquely references Orth’s reporting that Versace was HIV positive, which was supposedly kept private to protect the business.

As you may have already heard, an outraged Donatella Versace and her family have lashed out at Murphy and FX, calling “The Assassination of Gianni Versace” an unauthorized work of fiction and gossip. For what it’s worth, the Versaces come off sympathetically in the series, which is a surprise; Maya Rudolph’s impression of Donatella years ago on “Saturday Night Live” was probably more damaging than this. Carping about the new show only gives it more publicity.

Rather than exploit too many of Donatella’s glycerin tears, “The Assassination of Gianni Versace” is best (and most disturbing) when it chronicles the dismal fates of Cunanan’s other victims — quiet, nonfamous men who made the terrible mistake of crossing paths with a dangerous liar.

Particularly good is the third episode, which stars Mike Farrell (yes, of “M*A*S*H”) and “Transparent’s” Judith Light as Lee and Marilyn Miglin of Chicago. While Marilyn is out of town shooting a home-shopping network segment for her successful line of cosmetics, her husband, Lee, a successful real estate developer and closeted homosexual, invites Cunanan over for a night of sex.

Though what happens is indeed gruesome (Cunanan murders Lee), it is the scenes of Marilyn’s return to their townhouse and her particular responses in grief that strike the sort of thematic chord we expect from “American Crime Story”: This is an episode about the insidious nature of the closet, especially within a long marriage, where there really can be nothing left to hide — only something left to dutifully ignore.

A similar theme runs through the episodes that chronicle the sad ends of two of Cunanan’s other victims (skip reading if these already reported details feel like spoilers), including two of his friends: Jeff Trail (Finn Wittrock), a former Navy officer in San Diego, and David Madson (Cody Fern), a young architect from Minneapolis who meets Cunanan on a trip to California and repeatedly rejects his professions of love.

Both Jeff and David are uncomfortable with how their friend supports his Champagne (and methamphetamine) tastes by leeching off older gay men and regaling his admirers with lies about his background and employment.

Cunanan flies into a rage whenever anyone suggests he get a job and support himself. “It’s ordinary!” he screams, after his last sugar daddy has locked him out of the mansion. After a drugged-out nadir, a jealous Cunanan travels from San Diego to Minneapolis, where Jeff now lives — perhaps to be closer to David.

In “Assassination’s” confusing backward-is-forward timeline, we’ve already seen what happened when Cunanan got there: one body is found bludgeoned and rolled up in a carpet; the other is full of bullets and left by the side of a lake.

It’s never entirely clear what Murphy, et al., are asking us to see in all this. Is Lee Miglin’s closeted shame related to Jeff Trail’s anguish with the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policies? And does that line up with David Madson’s difficulty in coming out to his father? And does Cunanan kill them all (plus a cemetery caretaker, if only to steal his truck), because of the tenuous state of gay rights in mid-’90s America?

From this clumsy tangle of themes, a killer who is more deranged than on-message winds up at the Versace mansion’s front gate. Apparently, class resentment (slathered in self-loathing) is the reason that Murphy deems this crime an “assassination” rather than just another murder. It just doesn’t wash.

Review | FX’s ‘Assassination of Gianni Versace’ reaches for beauty but can’t find meaning

The Assassination of Gianni Versace Is Knotty, Uneven, and Captivating

A consuming sadness presides over the new installment of FX’s American Crime Story anthology series, The Assassination of Gianni Versace. Where its predecessor, The People v. O.J. Simpson, easily traded in searing sociopolitical timeliness, The Assassination of Gianni Versace has less obvious topicality. It’s the grim story of Andrew Cunanan, the spree killer whose final act before committing suicide was to gun down famed fashion designer Gianni Versace outside his palatial Miami Beach home in 1997.

Wealth and status and the particularly American hunger for them are themes evoked by this shocking murder tale, a random nobody snuffing out the life of a rich and powerful man in an effort to best him and become him. But beyond that, the story would seem to have less scope than the trial of O.J. Simpson did—less relevance to American life, not enough urgent bite to sustain a nine-episode television series.

And so producer Ryan Murphy and the writer Tom Rob Smith (of the similarly probing and despondent London Spy) are forced to get both more granular and more expansive, placing Cunanan’s crimes and Versace’s legacy in a more abstract cultural context. They’ve tried, ardently, to figure out what this murder, and Cunanan’s other murders, might mean in some bigger sense—if they mean anything at all. What they’ve come up with is erratic, arresting, often deeply unsettling. And, yes, bitterly sad.

The Assassination of Gianni Versace is not the detailing of a murder spree as much as it is a taxonomy of gay tragedy. It illustrates the maiming effect of the closet and the ways a society’s codified reverence for money and clout can badly entangle with private yearnings forced into the margins, into the dark. I’m not quite sure I buy all of its despairing theses, but The Assassination of Gianni Versace still grips like a vise—and a vice—as it descends into hell.

It is hell, really. Spending eight hours (I’ve not seen the last episode) with Andrew Cunanan is exhausting, miserable. A sweaty-suave con man and likely sociopath guided by quixotic visions of luxury, Cunanan is a user and an annihilator, circling the abyss in a decaying orbit. He’s Tom Ripley without any of the floppy charm. That charm is supposed to be there, I think, but the way he’s written and the way he’s played by Darren Criss—taking a major role and really going for it—make it near impossible to feel. Which isn’t a criticism, exactly. The show does at least convince you why some of its characters are taken by this swanning, ridiculous climber, even if we in the audience know what horrors he’s capable of.

We know because we might already be familiar with the story (Vanity Fair contributor Maureen Orth’s book Vulgar Favors is the primary source here), but also because The Assassination of Gianni Versace mostly works in reverse chronology. It opens with Versace’s murder, then inches back into Cunanan’s life as we meet his previous victims—before presenting something of a sympathetic origin story, in a ballsy move that surprisingly pays off.

This harrowing dissection of a killer’s trajectory is offset by a less compelling peek into the world of Versace (Edgar Ramirez), his sister Donatella (a terrific Penelope Cruz), and his lover Antonio (Ricky Martin, a nice surprise). While Smith’s script tries to draw parallels between Cunanan’s thwarted conniving for the gay American (or Italian) dream and Versace’s achievement of it, it doesn’t quite land. I love watching Cruz glide around a mansion smoking cigarettes and looking pained, but it all feels like it’s borrowed from a different, more fabulous, less searching series.

The true meat of the show is its attempt at diagramming the pitfalls of the gay experience in the 1990s, looking at AIDS and “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” in particular, and more diffusely surveying a community bonded by loneliness and secrecy and no small amount of buried shame. This is at once a grindingly pessimistic outlook on gay existence and a horrifyingly relatable one. Especially striking and awful is an episode centered on David Madson, the young Minneapolis architect who was the second person killed during the spree. The episode is flat-out devastating, with the excellent newcomer Cody Fern playing Madson as a quiet and kind man whose friendliness is cruelly exploited and punished by Cunanan. It’s not really a political episode, per se, not like the subsequent one about first victim Jeff Trail (Finn Wittrock, also great), who, in the show’s telling, whose career in the Navy was compromised because he was gay. But the Madson episode still cuts right to the heart of the show’s sorrowful idea, its rendering of Cunanan as a malevolent force created of a collective gay longing and oppression.

Was he, though? What, exactly, was Cunanan a byproduct of? The penultimate episode of the season puts forth some possible answers to that question, in the form of Andrew’s father, Modesto (a commanding, creepy Jon Jon Briones), a Coen Brothers–esque doomed huckster who dotes on his son well beyond what is healthy. Maybe it was just because I’d been sitting with this story for seven hours at that point, but this episode kinda sold me on its theory of how and why Cunanan eventually broke, ensnared as he was in an unyielding dream bored into him, quite terribly, by his father.

In the show’s estimation, Cunanan’s rapacious pursuit of social entrée was perversely linked to his craving for love, for companionship, for the validation and confirmation he thought a romantic partner could provide. And yet, in the show, Cunanan is almost comically incapable of finding and securing that; he’s too carried away, too delusional, too selfish. “No one wants your love,” a character angrily spits at Cunanan in one episode. It’s a shattering line, expressing Cunanan’s worst fear, and maybe so many of our own. Such malfunction, such hideousness is implied in that blunt curse: to be not just unlovable, but to be past that, where the love one merely offers up is vile and unneeded, laughable and easily dismissed.

The Assassination of Gianni Versace swaps People v. O.J.’s knotty legal systems for these dense psychological ones, turning Cunanan into a manifestation of a common gnawing worry: that we are silly and without worth, that we are abhorrent in our desire. It’s something queer people have been hearing for centuries—and for our whole individual lives.

Of course, in making a show about him, FX is essentially giving this murderer the glory he so wanted, which gives The Assassination of Gianni Versace a tinge of the problematic. Adjacent to that, I’m sure there will be plenty of people who find something too outsize and effortful about Criss’s performance. But to believe the series (and Orth’s book), Cunanan was just this kind of over-articulated showman, a desperate (and drug-addled) wannabe sophisticate who used his innate smarts to spin a tenuous, dangerous fantasy. I think Criss renders that cataclysmic energy pretty well—even if he is maybe too pretty for the role.

The Assassination of Gianni Versace has a narcotic pull. Its shifting sense of scale is dizzying as Criss insouciantly flings from extreme to extreme, from prevarication to peril. Smith has written a fraught, deeply personal piece that, in doing its noble best to be compassionate, somehow makes victims and villains and horrors of us all. I can’t imagine what straight people will think of it, if they even watch it. And I’m nervously anticipating the varied reaction from gay viewers.

To me, the show is both balm and menace, lurid exploitation and primal scream. The series doesn’t have the seismic, prestige heft of People v. O.J.,and it doesn’t share its forebear’s piercing intelligence. But in its messy and obliterating swirl, The Assassination of Gianni Versace does something ambitious and rattling. It frames a gay disaster as an intrinsically American one, binding personal values with national ones, tethering one sense of self-worth to another. In this particular assessment, Andrew Cunanan was not all of us. But he was certainly of us: a son who spun away, a brother who disappeared in all his mad scramble to be seen, taking with him five other lives, now enshrined in tragedy and forever unfulfilled.

The Assassination of Gianni Versace Is Knotty, Uneven, and Captivating

‘American Crime Story’ Designer on Quickly Duplicating Gianni Versace’s Nineties Style

Accurately re-creating the lavish and vibrant wardrobe of Gianni Versace was one of the most crucial elements of Ryan Murphy’s forthcoming “The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story,” which premieres Jan. 17 on FX.

For the nine-part series, which shows the time leading up to Versace’s tragic 1997 shooting by serial killer Andrew Cunanan, Murphy enlisted the talent of costume designer Lou Eyrich, who admits that duplicating the late Italian’s craftsmanship and design within a limited time frame posed a laundry list of challenges.

“It’s very hard to find authentic Versace pieces [from the early to mid-Nineties],” explains Eyrich on the phone from Los Angeles. “We tried to produce clothing of that couture quality, but the most daunting part was that we only had a matter of days [to do it].”

Filming for the series took place over several months last year in both Los Angeles and on-location at the late designer’s Miami home (where the fatal shooting took place), but according to an official statement released by the Versace family last week, the series is being characterized as “a work of fiction.” Murphy based the series on a 1999 book by Maureen Orth titled “Vulgar Favors,” which the family asserts is “full of gossip and speculation.”

Veracity of the storyline notwithstanding, Eyrich along with a team that included tailor Joanne Mills and designer Michael Costello, worked tirelessly to capture the colorful world of Gianni Versace, played by Édgar Ramírez, without actually having cooperation or guidance from the Milan-based company.

“I totally had the ‘I’m not worthy’ feeling,” explains Eyrich when hired by Murphy, the director with whom she also collaborated with for “American Horror Story,” “Feud” and “Glee.” “It’s especially daunting to me because I don’t really know that world of high fashion and couture, but because it’s a story that is a historical moment, I [thought] I could do my research and create this story.”

The on-screen narrative will show Versace’s opulent lifestyle in tandem with that of the serial killer, played by Darren Criss, who committed at least four additional murders over three months leading up to Versace’s July 1997 attack. “There are two different worlds going on,” she adds. “It’s very interesting working on costumes for these two parallels that are opposites, actually.”

The Minnesota-born Eyrich scoured online retailers and vintage shops for original pieces from the design house and for the Donatella Versace character, played by Penélope Cruz, created a reimagined facsimile of one of the brand’s iconic safety-pin dresses, which made its debut on the runway in the fall of 1993.

“We searched and searched and searched and finally found a belt with 18 of the safety pins from that famous collection,” recalls Eyrich. “But they were silver and we wanted gold.”

In order to achieve the look, the designer and her team “mutilated” the belt and had each safety-pin gold-plated — all within a matter of hours. Where the real-life Versace would take months in his atelier to create a couture gown, Eyrich and Mills would have only a matter of days. In fact, the process was so quick that the wardrobe team never actually made costume sketches. “If you look closely, then you shutter,” reveals Eyrich. “But for TV, it works — although in the world of HD and huge screens, it’s a little more daunting.”

The three-time Emmy Award winner says she would “stay awake at night trying to figure out how to create that Versace world” in a way that would be respectful to the brand’s integrity. “We just didn’t have the time frame to come up with all the details and that sometimes frustrates me.”

But it was paying respect to the brand’s eponymous founder that was of top importance to Eyrich and her colleagues on-set. “It was very eerie,” she explains. “Many of us were choked up being [at the murder location] with that feeling of needless loss. Everybody had moments of reflection.”

‘American Crime Story’ Designer on Quickly Duplicating Gianni Versace’s Nineties Style

‘Assassination of Gianni Versace’ ably wears ‘Crime Story’ mantle

“American Crime Story” faced a daunting challenge in following up the compulsive appeal of “The People v. O.J. Simpson.” The result, “The Assassination of Gianni Versace,” carves out its own distinctive approach to another high-profile, salacious murder without, perhaps inevitably, wearing the mantle quite as well.

To their credit, the producers have demonstrated the format’s elasticity by delving into the 1997 slaying of Versace, the famed fashion designer, as part of a killing spree by Andrew Cunanan.Working from Maureen Orth’s book “Vulgar Favors,” the narrative jumps around in time, filling in bits and pieces of the story out of sequence, in a manner that galvanizes attention and gradually builds in intensity.The show’s point of view, however, unfolds pretty squarely from the perspective of Cunanan, a compulsive liar and hustler whose grandiose vision of himself and pangs of economic anxiety triggered his tragic behavior.

While Darren Criss (who previously teamed with producer Ryan Murphy on “Glee”) delivers a strong, compelling performance, the underlying efforts to humanize Cunanan and, indeed, explain him drifts down some troubling and questionable corridors. As Murphy’s projects often do, the effect at times risks not just providing insight into a murderer, but glamorizing him and his grisly actions.

Understanding what drove Cunanan is at the heart of the project, but “The Assassination of Gianni Versace” is frankly more notable for some of its smaller roles, and for what it says about the toll exacted by homophobia and being closeted during the 1990s, which contributed to the authorities’ slow response.

Cunanan, for example, pursues wealth through relationships with older men, whose skulking around to hide who they are actually makes them prey for a sociopath eager to exploit them. In that regard, the project is exceptionally well cast at the margins, including Mike Farrell and Michael Nouri as two of Cunanan’s benefactors, as well as Judith Light as Farrell’s oblivious spouse.

Versace’s family has already criticized the series, but his experience is actually dealt with far less expansively. Edgar Ramirez plays him, with Ricky Martin as his lover and Penelope Cruz a perfect choice as his protective sister Donatella, who endeavors to be the business-minded ballast to her brother’s artistic genius.

“American Crime Story,” of course, has been victimized to a degree by its own success. The latest edition premieres as practically everyone in TV has been drawn to the true-crime genre, both in documentary and scripted form.

The challenge, of course, is that while there are plenty of sensational cases out there to mine and adapt, only a handful of them have the immediate recognition and heft to justify eight or 10 episodes, much less the allure of the Simpson trial.

Viewed that way, allowing for the stated misgivings, the latest “American Crime Story” nimbly demonstrates the latitude that FX has to operate under this banner. And if it doesn’t rise to the same level as its predecessor in terms of racing through an airport to catch the next episode, “Versace” ultimately aces the watch-ability test with flying colors.

‘Assassination of Gianni Versace’ ably wears ‘Crime Story’ mantle

How FX’s ‘Versace’ Tackles Homophobia and the Family’s Main Point of Contention

The Versace family has now issued two statements denouncing FX’s The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story. But the producers and stars all maintain that the second season of FX’s Emmy-winning anthology is a respectful portrayal of the famed fashion designer, who was gunned down by wanted killer Andrew Cunanan on the steps of his Miami mansion in the summer of 1997.

“The primary thing is that we are celebrating Versace,” writer Tom Rob Smith tells The Hollywood Reporter. “We are exploring why he was a genius, why he was important, the impact that he made, and why it was such a loss when he was murdered — both on a personal level in terms of all the people that loved him, all the people that admired him, and on a cultural level as well. It’s a show that celebrates and admires him.”

The family’s main point of contention seems to be the portrayal of Gianni Versace as HIV-positive, which reporter Maureen Orth contended in her book Vulgar Favors. (The season is based on Orth’s book and reporting.) Orth, who covered the hunt for Cunanan for Vanity Fair at the time, was told on the record by a Miami Beach detective that blood tests done after Versace’s death confirmed his HIV-positive status. Orth, for her part, told THR that more than a decade later, she stands by her reporting.

“I was told on the record by the lead detective on Miami Beach that he had heard from the medical examiner who did the blood work that he was [HIV-positive],” Orth said. “And it also goes along with other people who told me that he was very weak at one time and he needed [partner] Antonio to help him walk, and they came over to his house when he was having breakfast and he had 27 bottles of pills in front of him. Now, does that mean they’re for HIV? But the blood thing from on record from the Miami Beach, that’s pretty [solid].”

The Versace family has blasted the FX drama as a “work of fiction” and Orth’s book, saying that the FX series relies on a book they say is “full of gossip and speculation.”

“Orth never received any information from the Versace family and she has no basis to make claims about the intimate personal life of Gianni Versace or other family members. Instead, in her effort to create a sensational story, she presents second-hand hearsay that is full of contradictions,” the family said in a statement. “Orth makes assertions about Gianni Versace’s medical condition based on a person who claims he reviewed a postmortem test result, but she admits it would have been illegal for the person to have reviewed the report in the first place (if it existed at all). In making her lurid claims, she ignores contrary information provided by members of Mr. Versace’s family, who…were in the best position to know the facts of his life…. Of all the possible portrayals of his life and legacy, it is sad and reprehensible that the producers have chosen to present the distorted and bogus version created by Maureen Orth.”

Showrunner Ryan Murphy responded to the family’s criticism, telling THR that Donatella Versace’s actions seemed to indicate she wasn’t entirely displeased with the series. “Donatella Versace sent Penelope Cruz [who portrays her in Versace] a very large arrangement of flowers when she was representing the show at the Golden Globes,” he said. “I don’t know if she is going to watch the show, but if she did, I think she would see that we treat her and her family with respect and kindness, and she really is sort of a feminist role model in my book because she had to step into an impossible situation, which she did with grace and understanding.”

But regardless of Versace’s status, the fact that he overcame a serious illness and was excited about his life provides a sharp contrast to the desperation of Cunanan’s outlook.

“To me if you look at just the facts of his illness, he did get very sick at that time, and he did recover at the time of the new [HIV/AIDS] drug therapy. So it does seem to fit that,” Smith said. “But even all that aside, what I found most amazing about it is this is a guy that came so close to death, and still clung on. He really fought for life. Life was very important to him. Contrast it with someone who gave up, and someone who was beaten by circumstance. And what’s interesting in some of the reactions was, ‘Oh, he’s the killer. He must have AIDS.’ Actually, Andrew didn’t have it.”

Cunanan (played by Glee alum Darren Criss) shot Versace as he returned from his morning walk to the newsstand, something the designer did regularly when he was staying in Florida — even when he was sick.

“Gianni did the walk to the magazine store in Miami often. Once he did it when he was so sick he could barely make it that couple of blocks. He was carrying the magazines back, and he couldn’t even hold them. That morning [of his death] when he walks, he’s so alive again. It’s really powerful to think that he must’ve been like, ‘This life is great,’ and he can do that walk and carry the magazines. And then Andrew comes up,” Smith said. “It’s really terrible when you look at those two. I thought that was a really powerful part of his story, so that was why we did it.”

Edgar Ramirez, who plays the late designer, did not contact the Versace family for both legal and personal reasons when he was preparing to take on the part in theMurphy-produced drama.

“What this family went through was a horrible tragedy, and I would understand [not wanting to discuss it], had it been my case to be contacted to talk about something that caused so much pain and also was infused with so much misrepresentation, prejudice, and so much stigma and confusion,” Ramirez told THR. “I was lucky enough to have people who were very very close to Gianni to talk to me and to open to me. They were the ones that were very generous to me.”

Ricky Martin, who plays Versace’s longtime partner, Antonio D’Amico, did speak to the man he portrays, and said he now counts the designer among his friends. But before they spoke, he simply wanted to get a small amount of justice for Versace’s murder, a crime he says shouldn’t have even happened in the first place.

“There’s so much injustice,” he told THR. “Why did we allow it to happen when this killer was on a killing spree for weeks, killing gay men? He was on the list of the FBI’s most wanted. He was not hiding. Why did it happen? Just the fact that we are still dealing with this level of ignorance frustrates me.”

As a gay man, he wanted to bring the story not only of the homophobia that contributed to Versace’s death, but the struggle he faced in his life.

“The fact that someone as successful and as powerful as Gianni Versace was struggling to come out of the closet, it was like, give me a break,” Martin said. “That was in 1997, but I know now in 2018, there are men and women that are still struggling with this kind of fear, of their career going to collapse if they come out. Everybody’s going to hate them at home if they come out. It is sad. But it was important for me to be vocal about how unjust life is for some of us. I’m so lucky, but it’s not right. Something needs to be done.”

How FX’s ‘Versace’ Tackles Homophobia and the Family’s Main Point of Contention

The Assassination of Gianni Versace Isn’t What You Expect

You’ve got to hand it to Ryan Murphy: Love him or hate him, he never gives you quite what you expect. The first season of his FX anthology series American Crime Story (not to be confused with Murphy’s other anthology, American Horror Story) was an acclaimed ten-part look at the O.J. Simpson criminal trial that examined the subject matter from multiple perspectives, including those of the defense, the prosecution, and the jury, and illuminated the case’s wider context while allowing its central character, Simpson, to remain an enigma until the end. Season two, The Assassination of Gianni Versace, about the titular fashion designer’s murder by a serial killer, does all of those things, more or less (including the enigma part) while swapping in homophobia, AIDS, and gay rights for the first season’s focus on racism, sexism, and police misconduct.

But the tone, the pace, the feel of the season are all quite different. Adapted by novelist and London Spy screenwriter Tom Rob Smith from a 2000 nonfiction book by Maureen Orth titled Vulgar Favors: Andrew Cunanan, Gianni Versace, and the Largest Failed Manhunt in U.S. History, it prizes atmosphere, characterization, architecture, and, yes, fashion over traditional storytelling virtues. It doesn’t attempt anything like the intricate structure of the O.J. season, which was as meticulously organized as a good lawyer’s evidence files, but it’s not disorganized, either. If anything, the structure of this one is much simpler, built around a conceit that has a certain poetry: We start with the murder and work our way backward chronologically, à la Memento or Irreversible.

The pilot, directed by Murphy in a series of gliding, faintly sinister long takes, starts by introducing Versace (Édgar Ramírez), his longtime partner Antonio D’Amico (Ricky Martin), and his soon-to-be-killer Andrew Cunanan (Darren Criss) in Miami on the day of the fashion designer’s 1997 murder, and builds inexorably to Cunanan shooting Versace to death outside the gates of his mansion. (The cinematography, by Murphy’s regular director of photography Nelson Cragg, is exceptional, using very wide-angle lenses to abstract the lines, colors, and shapes of rooms, hallways, building exteriors, and landscapes, so that you appreciate them as you might a suit or dress.) From that point on, the story moves according to its own slowed-down rhythms, choosing to focus its attention on people and events that might seem unconnected to the Versace murder until it dawns on you that you aren’t watching a procedural, or even what certain news outlets call an “explainer,” but something more like a psychologically oriented nonfiction novel — one that uses a combination of careful research and blatant dramatic license to speculate on why real people did the things they did, and how some of them ended up crossing paths in the first place.

Fans of the O.J. season might get whiplash from this one. Murphy’s direction sets a fresh template in the pilot — elegant and decadent, anxious and solemn, steeped in unglamorous, workaday details and historical milestones. The latter include the U.S. military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, which drove many qualified gay and lesbians into the closet or out into civilian life; the AIDS epidemic, which was also explored in Murphy’s divisive but vigorous HBO adaptation of The Normal Heart; and key events in the life of the Versace family, including Gianni’s decision to come out, his murder by Cunanan, and his sister Donatella’s (Penélope Cruz) attempt to carve out her own identity in the family business. Throughout, however, more time is devoted to Cunanan than either of the Versaces, and despite Criss’s memorably creepy-enthusiastic performance as Cunanan, the killer never seems like more than an unnerving bundle of insecurity, grandiosity, deceptiveness, and petulance, with a touch of Norman Bates’s birdlike insistence and Patrick Bateman’s obsession with brands. He’s a character who’s tailor-made for viewer projection and thinkpiece generation, but who never registers as a human being as powerfully as the major supporting characters, the Versaces in particular. (The dialogue doesn’t always do him or anyone else favors. Not even a performer as skilled and charismatic as Cruz can put across a sentiment like, “You live in isolation, surrounded by beauty and kindness. You have forgotten how cruel the world can be.”)

And yet — odd as this might sound — Cunanan ultimately works rather well as kind of storytelling device, moving the tale backward through time, and all over the continental U.S. This strategy won’t be to everyone’s liking, and I won’t pretend that it works like gangbusters all the time. But it’s a valid storytelling approach that’s been used in everything from Robert Bresson’s Au Hasard Balthazar to Steven Spielberg’s War Horse, and it gives Murphy & Co. a pretext to spend quality time with other Cunanan victims who weren’t particularly famous, which is opposite of what productions like this usually do.

The cast of characters who are each granted the equivalent of their own short film includes closeted real-estate developer Lee Miglin, touchingly portrayed by former M*A*S*H star Mike Farrell, and Jeff Trail (Finn Wittrock), a former Navy lieutenant driven out the service by institutional as well as personal bigotry. Although it’s regrettable in some ways that it took the story of a gay serial killer to create the framework for a series of sketches about gay men of different ages and social classes (all white except Cunanan, who was half-Filipino), it’s also remarkable to see a major cable drama devote one-and-a-half episodes to somebody like Trail, an intriguingly complex noncelebrity who defended a fellow gay sailor from two homophobic attacks, cut a tattoo off his own leg to prevent investigators from using it to identify him in one of their witch hunts, and ultimately resolved to move away from San Diego because the sight of Navy ships in the harbor was breaking his heart.

Throughout, the variety of locales is more wide-ranging than could’ve been anticipated: Besides ‘90s-era Miami, we briefly visit San Francisco, San Diego, Los Angeles, Milwaukee, Chicago, New York City, and Pennsville, New Jersey, and the fetishistic production design and costuming consistently nail the little details that help sell a moment, from the high-waist, stone-washed jeans Cunanan sometimes wears to the blocky TVs and computers in every home, apartment, and office. And even when the story spends more time marinating in a subplot or scene than its dramatic content might justify, you can be confident that if you just stick with it for another five or ten minutes, there’ll be a scene unlike any you’ve ever encountered, like the flashback to a victim’s childhood that shows him going on a hunting trip with his father, running away in horror after the old man shoots a duck, then being consoled rather than chastised afterwards, and sincerely assured that hunting is “not for everyone.” The Assassination of Gianni Versace isn’t for everyone, either, but it’s sincere and committed as it follows its own path. When you get to the end, the reversed storytelling could seem sad, because you’re thinking about the inevitable tragedies to come, or restorative, because the dead have been systematically resurrected and have at least a bit more living to do.

The Assassination of Gianni Versace Isn’t What You Expect