American Crime Story: The Assassination Of Gianni Versace
9pm, BBC Two
As this astonishing series nears its end, it gets even more brain scrambling. It’s the penultimate episode, and the backwards-running structure stretches back to its furthest points, to offer two parallel, contrasting portraits of childhood, in two different timeframes. In 1957, we glimpse the young Gianni Versace, aged 10 or so, and encouraged by his dressmaker mother to follow his heart and learn about and designing clothes, despite the taunts of other kids and disapproval of his teachers. Flipping forward to 1980 comes a fuller and more unsettling picture of Andrew Cunanan around the same age – singled out for special treatment and pressurised to succeed by his father, Modesto, a stockbroker with big dreams, and given to making big exaggerations about himself. As Cunanan becomes a young man, however, the house of cards Modesto has built begins to collapse. Darren Criss’s performance as Cunanan is extraordinary again, while the casting of the child actor playing young Cunanan (Edouard Holdener) is spooky.
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Alison Rowat on TV: The Assassination of Gianni Versace, Top Gear, Save Me, Civilisations, Benidorm
FROM Capote’s In Cold Blood to David Simon’s Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets, no one does stranger than fiction true crime as well as America. One of the TV highlights of recent years was the series American Crime Story: The People v OJ Simpson, an account of the “trial of the century” from bonkers white Bronco chase to controversial verdict. Now from the same stable comes The Assassination of Gianni Versace (BBC2, Wednesday, 9pm), and one episode in it is just as gripping.
As with OJ, Assassination starts with what we know, that the Italian fashion designer was murdered on the stops of his Miami mansion by Andrew Cunanan, and spools onwards and backwards from there. The opening section contrasted Versace’s gilded life, all servants, calm, and freshly squeezed juice, with his killer running around in a sweat, preparing to do the deed. As writer Tom Robb Smith (London Spy) showed, the grisly circus began immediately, with someone trying to flog a photo of the body to the media and a souvenir-hunting couple tearing a Versace ad out of a magazine and dipping it in the victim’s blood. American Crime Story, far from turning away from such details, cannot get enough of them. If the OJ ratings are any guide, viewers feel the same.
Alison Rowat on TV: The Assassination of Gianni Versace, Top Gear, Save Me, Civilisations, Benidorm
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