The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story is going to disappoint a lot of people, I think. The people who had such a blast with The People v. O.J. Simpson, who rolled around in the ’90s nostalgia and gawked at how well the actors were playing these pop culture footnotes whose faces and actions we’d remembered from 20 years ago — those people are not going to find very much fun in revisiting the killing spree of Andrew Cunanan, who murdered five people beginning in April 1997, culminating in the murder of Italian designer Gianni Versace in front of his palatial Miami home in July of that same year. This wasn’t a media circus nor a long-running judicial soap opera, and it doesn’t say the Big Things about the American justice system or racial dynamics that The People v. O.J. did. That show was a perfect storm; a thrillingly multi-faceted story that we all remembered with a mixture of fascination, disbelief, and humor, even as we took the appropriate moments to nod mournfully at the deaths of two people. It was good and good for you, and it was also a whole lot of fun. This is not that.

Versace will also likely disappoint anyone looking for a deeper look at the life and accomplishments of its title character. Though Versace’s death is the focal point of the first episode, and his character recurs throughout the series in scenes from earlier in his life, this is no more a series about Gianni Versace — famed gay Italian fashion designer whose clothes and runway presentations brought a pop celebrity element to fashion in the ’90s — than The People v. O.J. was about Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman. …Okay, he’s not that absent from the narrative; you don’t cast Edgar Ramirez, Penelope Cruz, and Ricky Martin to play the Versace wing of this story and completely cut them off. But anyone looking for a gaudy Ryan Murphy take on the excesses of the Versace lifestyle, with Cruz doing her best Maya Rudolph “get ooooooout” as Donatella will have to be content with the first episode. That hour pauses to stare lasciviously at the decor of Versace’s Miami mansion; the servants who hold trays with orange juice in champagne flutes for Gianni’s morning routine. It’s luxurious and excessive, and since the one thing we do know about this story is that Versace will soon be dead, it feels sharply cruel. It feels, in short, like a Ryan Murphy series, which often gives you exactly the sex/violence/intrigue you want and then slaps you a little bit for watching it.

But beyond those first minutes, Versace fades into the background to make room for, as cosmically unfair as this may seem, his killer, Andrew Cunanan. It may not turn out to be a popular decision — I’ll be shocked if The Assassination of Gianni Versace is even a fraction of the hit that People v. O.J. was — but creatively, it’s hard to quibble, because here’s the thing: the show that we get, the show about Andrew Cunanan and his murder victims and the systems that kept them hidden away, either in the shadows or behind gilded gates, that show is a bit of brilliance.

Produced by Ryan Murphy, written by London Spy‘s Tom Rob Smith, based off of the Maureen Orth book Vulgar Favors and told in reverse chronology, from the Versace movie on backwards, the story of Andrew Cunanan — con artist, drug addict, rent boy, striver, liar, killer — doesn’t lend itself to the kind of armchair quarterbacking (forgive the football pun) that the O.J. Simpson trial did. It’s all murkier, dirtier, sadder than any of us remember. While Versace’s murder and the subsequent manhunt for Cunanan made national news, the details of the killing, and the four murders that preceded it, weren’t the kind of kitchen-table fascinations that Marcia Clark and F. Lee Bailey were. There is a sense, after watching the series (8 of the 9 episodes were made available to press), that the Cunanan killings were treated in the American imagination as a kind of niche gay horror, mired in the darkened clubs and closeted assignations that still characterized the gay experience of the 1990s.

As successful as the series is at following Cunanan, played by Darren Criss as a frighteningly unknowable cipher whose desperation to feel important (rich, famous, beautiful, loved) leads him inexorably to murder, it’s even better as a depiction of the role homophobia and the closet played in both the murders and their subsequent investigations. Four of Cunanan’s five victims — excepting cemetery caretaker William Reese, who was murdered essentially as a bystander as Cunanan stole his truck — were either gay or rumored to be gay, and their relationship to Cunanan (lovers? objects of desire/envy?) unclear. The low-key but persistent homophobia of the time period is insidious and pervasive. It’s there as Miami police question Versace’s partner Antonio D’Amico (Ricky Martin) about his and Gianni’s sex lives. It’s there as investigators question Marilyn Miglin (Judith Light) about her husband, Lee, the Chicago real estate tycoon and Cunanan’s third victim. (Miglin’s relationship to Cunanan has long been in dispute, and while Murphy and co. keep the technicalities shrouded, it’s clear where the show stands on the matter.) It’s there in the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell minefield traversed by Jeff Trail (a fantastic Finn Wittrock), Cunanan’s first victim, who met Cunanan in the San Diego gay bars he visited in secret while he was in the Navy. And it’s there behind the haunted eyes of David Madson (the utterly revelatory Cody Fern), Cunanan’s second victim.

The David Madson killing is the one we know least about, and as a result the one that Murphy and Smith take the most liberties with. But where you might expect “Ryan Murphy takes liberties” to lead to something gaudy and over-the-top, the show instead imagines a devastating series of events that lays bare the show’s clearest theme: 1990s American attitudes about LGBT people kept these murders quiet, kept these victims trapped, kept their salvation out of reach.

In Darren Criss, Ryan Murphy has found one of his most deeply committed and terrifying muses. He disappears into a character who himself disappears into whomever he’s trying to be. He’s not a Catch Me If You Can-style chameleon. Andrew’s is a sneaker and more darklyrelatable kind of malleability. He’s whatever version of himself he wants to be. He can come from wealth, he can be building sets for the upcoming Titanic movie, he can work in the financial sectors of the entertainment industry, he can have met Gianni Versace one night at a San Francisco club. Criss does this all with a frightening amount of charm in a performance that’s as deeply committed as anyone on a Ryan Murphy show to date.

The Versace material, beyond the first episode, acts in a kind of counterpoint to the events of the Cunanan story. Versace’s bold move to out himself publicly, at a time when even the most obviously gay celebrities never talked about it in the media, is contrasted with Trail’s Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell struggles. Donatella Versace’s determination to keep her brother’s fashion empire in the family finds a mirror later in Marilyn Miglin holding tightly to her and her husband’s legacy. Anyone looking for Penelope Cruz to burlesque her way to an Emmy will probably walk away disappointed that the show doesn’t give her enough to do, but for once Murphy has opted for moderation.

Rather than a portrait of the life and death of a fashion icon, Murphy and Smith have created a diffuse collage of tragedy and crime that will probably confound and frustrate the very audience that found The People v. O.J. so intoxicating. But there’s real gravity to this story and a frustrated, heartbroken scream into a hostile void that cuts far deeper than mere rubbernecking. It’s not fun, but it’s not to be missed.

‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace’ Paints A Devastating Portrait of 1990s Homophobia