Ryan Murphy hates the word “camp.” He sees it as a lazy catchall that gets thrown at gay artists in order to marginalize their ambitions, to frame their work as niche. “I don’t think that when John Waters made ‘Female Trouble’ that he was, like, ‘I want to make a camp piece,’ ” Murphy told me last May, as we sat in a production tent in South Beach, Florida, where he was directing the pilot of “American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace,” a nine-episode series for FX. “I think that he was, like, ‘It’s my tone—and my tone is unique.’ ”
Murphy prefers a different label: “baroque.” Between shots, the showrunner—who has overseen a dozen television series in the past two decades—elaborated, with regal authority, on this idea. To Murphy, “camp” describes not irony but something closer to clumsiness, the accident you can’t look away from. People rarely use the term to describe a melodrama made by a straight man; even when “camp” is meant as a compliment, it contains an insult, suggesting a musty smallness. “Baroque” is big. Murphy, referring to TV critics (including me) who have applied “camp” to his work, said, “I will admit that it really used to bug the shit out of me. But it doesn’t anymore.”
We were outside the Casa Casuarina, the Mediterranean-style mansion that the Italian fashion designer Gianni Versace renovated and considered his masterwork—a building with airy courtyards and a pool inlaid with dizzy ribbons of red, orange, and yellow ceramic tiles. A small bronze statue of a kneeling Aphrodite stood at the top of the mansion’s front steps. In 1997, a young gay serial killer named Andrew Cunanan shot Versace to death there as the designer, who was fifty, was returning from his morning stroll.
The previous day, Murphy had filmed the murder scene. Cunanan was played by Darren Criss, a star of Murphy’s biggest hit, “Glee.” I’d visited the set that day, too, arriving to find ambulances, cops, and paparazzi swarming outside. There was a splash of red on the marble steps. Inside the house, Edgar Ramirez, the Venezuelan actor playing Versace, sat in a shaded courtyard, his hair caked with gun-wound makeup, his face lowered in his hands.
Now Murphy was filming the aftermath of the crime, including a scene in which two lookie-loos dip a copy of Vanity Fair into the puddle of Versace’s blood. (They sell the relic on eBay.) The vibe was an odd blend of sombre and festive; a half-naked rollerblader spun in slow circles on the sidewalk next to the beach. Murphy, who is fifty-three, is a stylish man, but on set he wore the middle-aged male showrunner’s uniform: baggy cargo shorts and a polo shirt. He has a rosebud mouth and close-cropped vanilla hair. He is five feet ten but has a brawny air of command, creating the illusion that he is much taller. His brother is six feet four, he told me, as was his late father; Murphy thinks that his own growth was stunted by chain-smoking when he was a rebellious teen-ager, in Indiana.
Murphy’s mood tends to shift unexpectedly, like a wonky thermostat—now warm, now icy—but on the “Versace” set he made one confident decision after another about the many shows he was overseeing, as if skipping stones. He also answered stray questions—about the casting for a Broadway revival of “The Boys in the Band” that he was producing, about a grand house in Los Angeles that he’d been renovating for two years. “Ooh, yes!” he said, inspecting penis-nosed clown masks that had been designed for his series “American Horror Story.” He approved a bespoke nail-polish design for an actress. A producer handed Murphy an updated script, joking, “If there’s a mistake, you can drown me in Versace’s pool!,” then scheduled a notes meeting for “American Crime Story: Katrina,” whose writers were working elsewhere in the building. Now and then, Murphy FaceTimed with his then four-year-old son, Logan, who, along with his two-year-old brother, Ford, was in L.A. with Murphy’s husband, David Miller.
“I never get overwhelmed or feel underwater, because I feel like all good things come from detail,” Murphy told me. It’s what got him to this point: the compulsion, and the craving, to do more. “Baroque is a sensibility I can get behind,” he said. “Baroque is a maximalist approach to storytelling that I’ve always liked. Baroque is a choice. And everything I do is an absolute choice.”
Murphy’s choices, perhaps more than those of any other showrunner, have upended the pieties of modern television. Like a wild guest at a dinner party, he’d lifted the table and slammed it back down, leaving the dishes broken or arranged in a new order. Several of Murphy’s shows have been critically divisive (and, on occasion, panned in ways that have raised his hackles). But he has produced an unusually long string of commercial and critical hits: audacious, funny-peculiar, joyfully destabilizing series, in nearly every genre. His run started with the satirical melodrama “Nip/Tuck” (2003), then continued with the global phenomenon “Glee” (2009) and with “American Horror Story,” now entering its eighth year, which launched the influential season-long anthology format. His legacy is not one standout show but, rather, the sheer force and variety and chutzpah of his creations, which are linked by a singular storytelling aesthetic: stylized extremity and rude humor, shock conjoined with sincerity, and serious themes wrapped in circus-bright packaging. He is the only television creator who could possibly have presented Lily Rabe as a Satan-possessed nun, gyrating in a red negligee in front of a crucifix while singing “You Don’t Own Me,” and have it come across as an indelible critique of the Catholic Church’s misogyny.
When Murphy entered the industry, he sometimes struck his peers as an aloof, prickly figure; he has deep wounds from those years, although he admits that he contributed to this reputation. Nonetheless, Murphy has moved steadily from the margins to television’s center. He changed; the industry changed; he changed the industry. In February, Murphy rose even higher, signing the largest deal in television history: a three-hundred-million-dollar, five-year contract with Netflix. For Murphy, it was a moment of both triumph and tension. You can’t be the underdog when you’re the most powerful man in TV.
On that sunny afternoon in South Beach, however, Murphy was still comfortably ensconced in a twelve-year deal with Fox Studios. On FX, which is owned by Fox, he had three anthology series: “American Horror Story”; “American Crime Story,” for which he was filming “Versace,” writing “Katrina,” and planning a season based on the Monica Lewinsky scandal; and “Feud,” whose first season starred Susan Sarandon as Bette Davis and Jessica Lange as Joan Crawford.
For Fox, he was developing “9-1-1,” a procedural about first responders. He had announced two shows for Netflix: “Ratched,” a nurse’s-eye view of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” starring Sarah Paulson; and “The Politician,” a satirical drama starring Ben Platt. Glenn Close was trying to talk him into directing her in a movie version of the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical “Sunset Boulevard.” Murphy was writing a book called “Ladies,” about female icons. He had launched Half, a foundation dedicated to diversity in directing, and had committed to hiring half of his directors from underrepresented groups. And, he told me, there was something new: a series for FX called “Pose,” a dance-filled show set in the nineteen-eighties.
It was no mystery which character in his current series Murphy most identified with: Gianni Versace himself. Versace was a commercially minded artist whose brash inventions were dismissed by know-nothings as tacky, and whose openness about his sexuality threatened his ascent in a homophobic era. Versace, too, was a baroque maximalist, Murphy told me, who built his reputation through fervid workaholism—an insistence that his vision be seen and understood. “He was punished and he struggled,” Murphy said, then spoke in Versace’s voice: “Why aren’t I loved for my excess? Why don’t they see something valid in that?”
[…] Murphy has long been a connoisseur of extremes and hyperbole, games and theatricality. He rates everything he sees and revels in institutions that do the same—the Oscars are a kind of religion for him. In Miami, at dinner with the “Katrina” and “Versace” writers, he played a high-stakes game in which he was forced to immediately choose one person in his circle over another; he demurred only when the choice was between Jessica Lange and Sarah Paulson. His go-to question is “Is it a hit or a flop?,” and he asked it about every show that came up in conversation, as I observed him giving shape to “Pose,” from scouting locations to editing dance footage. (He has other stock phrases. “What’s the scoop?” is how he begins writers’ meetings. “Energy begets energy” explains his impulse to add new projects. “That’s interesting” sometimes indicates “That’s worth noticing” but just as often means “That’s infuriating.”)
[…] His multitasking benefits greatly from the freedoms of cable and streaming: he has zero nostalgia for the twenty-two-episode network grind of a show like “Glee,” in which “halfway through Episode 15 you had nothing left to say, the actors were sick, the writers were sick, and it was fucking oatmeal until the end.” He favors eight or ten episodes, often with a small writers’ room, as with “Pose.” He writes scripts for some shows, whereas for others he gives notes; on a few projects, like his HBO adaptation of Larry Kramer’s play “The Normal Heart,” he’s very hands-on. “We left blood on the dance floor,” Murphy said, affectionately, of his three-year collaboration with Kramer. “Versace” had one writer, Tom Rob Smith. But Murphy provided close directorial, design, and casting oversight, and he had a strong commitment to the show’s themes, particularly the contrast between Versace and Cunanan, two gay men craving success, but only one willing to work for it.
[…] In the meanwhile, Murphy had scored a ratings bonanza with Fox’s “9-1-1,” a wackadoo procedural featuring stories like one about a baby caught in a plumbing pipe. It was his parting gift to Dana Walden. “Versace” had been, by certain standards, a flop: lower ratings, mixed reviews. Artistically, though, it was one of Murphy’s boldest shows, with a backward chronology and a moving performance by Criss as Cunanan, a panicked dandy hollowed out by self-hatred. After the finale aired, a new set of reviews emerged. Matt Brennan, on Paste, argued that “Versace” had been subjected to “the straight glance”—a critical gaze that skims queer art, denying its depths. “Even critics sympathetic to the series seem as uncomfortable with its central subject as the Miami cops were with those South Beach fags,” Brennan wrote. Murphy was reading a new oral history of Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America,” in which, in one scene, Roy Cohn denies being gay because, he barks, homosexuals lack power: they are “men who know nobody and who nobody knows.” The line echoes one in “Versace.” A homeless junkie dying of aids tells the cops, bitterly, why gay men couldn’t stop talking about the designer: “We all imagined what it would be like to be so rich and so powerful that it doesn’t matter that you’re gay.”
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