Tag: march 2018

‘Assassination Of Gianni Versace’ Is The Best Ryan Murphy Show You Didn’t Watch

The second season of “American Crime Story” arrived with the near-impossible burden of topping 2016′s immaculate O.J. Simpson retelling. Simpson’s scandal was familiar to almost anyone who watched the show, but the saga of Gianni Versace, the designer murdered at the gates of his Miami mansion in July 1997, had faded from our cultural discourse, perhaps because the fashion scene doesn’t attract the significance granted to something as macho as football.

So when “Crime Story” graduated from Simpson to Versace, it felt like the perfect fodder for Ryan Murphy, master of sophisticated schlock. Murphy could again explore a nuanced tragedy, but this time he had less preconceived mythology to address.

Does “The Assassination of Gianni Versace” indeed top “The People v. O.J. Simpson”? Not quite, but that doesn’t matter. In both seasons, Murphy and his company of writers pushed past exploitable headlines to tackle race, sexuality, class and the media.

“Versace” came to an end on Wednesday, and we count ourselves ― reporters Matthew Jacobs and Cole Delbyck ― as massive fans. Instead of revolving around the titular couturier, this was really the story of Andrew Cunanan (played by Darren Criss), the spree killer who executed at least five men ― four of whom were gay, including Versace ― before committing suicide. The cross-stitched narrative turned out to be a smart tactic, even for those of us who expected a show with Versace in the title to fixate more on the Versace empire. Gianni and his sister, Donatella, were background players in a seedy pageant that resulted in an FBI manhunt and a stirring case of internalized homophobia writ large.

Time to discuss!

Matthew Jacobs: All right, Cole, let’s delve into the nine episodes of “The Assassination of Gianni Versace,” a show that not enough people watched, probably because it was very dark and very gay. But those should be selling points, and now that the season is over, I think it’s among Ryan Murphy’s best, most complicated works. Even in its disjointed moments, “Versace” felt haunted by demons literal (Andrew Cunanan) and figurative (class envy, crippling homophobia). Every bit built toward the finale’s unapologetic bleakness ― nothing left but a mausoleum and its entombed tragedy. What’d you make of the whole thing?

Cole Delbyck: Having watched Ryan Murphy productions in good times (early seasons of “American Horror Story,” anything Mary Cherry, “Feud,” that “Rumor Has It”/“Someone Like You” mashup on “Glee”) and bad (“AHS: Cult,” the “Glee” puppet episode, Julia Roberts not fitting into her “Eat Pray Love” jeans), I feel confident saying that “The Assassination of Gianni Versace” is the crown jewel of his career.

The show featured classic elements of his storytelling, e.g. truly batshit moments like that duct-tape asphyxiation sex scene. But it also managed to comment on all too relevant issues facing the gay community today, filtered through the lens of the very troubled and often shirtless Andrew Cunanan. Experiencing the killer’s mental breakdown in reverse was a true exercise in empathy that left us with a portrait of a man who just wanted to be remembered. Now, of course, Murphy has granted his greatest wish, which also feels somewhat troubling.

Matt: The show’s troubling mien that you mention is a fierce and valid observation (as is Darren Criss’ bare chest). Murphy has long adopted a two-steps-forward, one-step-back quality to the progressive television he makes. He gives actresses of a certain age dynamic roles and tells unabashedly queer stories, then he has Emma Roberts call a character “white mammy” and liken her to a “house slave” in the “Scream Queens” pilot. Ryan Murphy is complicated!

In this case, though, I found the whole affair a bit ― what’s the word? ― cathartic. In the age of “Carol” and “Call Me by Your Name” and “Love, Simon,” there’s a poignancy in witnessing a gay man, living in the shadow of the AIDS crisis, wrecked by society’s chauvinism. I’m not sure “antihero” is an apt label, but the series was wise enough not to villainize him too much.

Cole: Greenlighting the “Love, Simon” and “Assassination of Gianni Versace” crossover in 3, 2, 1.

Murphy is for sure a problematic fave who’s had his fair share of cringeworthy moments. “Versace,” however, felt squarely within his wheelhouse. That’s why I’m a little nervous about the next “American Crime Story” installment, about Hurricane Katrina, because he’s at his best when deconstructing the various facets of masculinity and how it can either ensnare or liberate his characters.

Here, Andrew Cunanan became a sponge for the worst society has to offer, soaking up lessons of power, abuse and deceit at an early age from his father, played by Jon Jon Briones, who had some of my favorite scenes in the series. While Criss’ performance deserves all the acclaim and the Emmy Award he will eventually be nominated for, I even more so appreciated the smaller performances from Judith Light, Cody Fern, Finn Wittrock and Mike Farrell. Here is where “The Assassination of Gianni Versace” soared when dealing with figures we don’t know so well, in contrast to the Versace family moments, which were well-acted but clunky.

Matt: Judith Light! MVP. The sympathy that character feels for her husband, whose affair with Andrew resulted in his death, gave the show its most powerful moments. Her refusal to let the police talk her into hiding from Andrew in the finale ― “How many more are going to die?” she demands ― signals a woman who understands how troubled her partner’s existence must have been. As for the Versaces, well, yep. That’s what I was getting at earlier with regard to the series’ disjointedness.

As Donatella (Penélope Cruz) rose to her brother’s perch, the show drifted away from its twin stories of ambition and self-discovery; at some point, the politics of a lucrative fashion house diverge from those of a sociopathic twentysomething. But in another way, the parallel became all too glaring. Gianni Versace (Édgar Ramírez), who rejected Andrew’s kiss and pleas for mentorship, represented everything Andrew couldn’t obtain. Fame, wealth and love helped Gianni to embrace his sexuality. But Andrew failed to secure any of those, and it drilled such a hole in his heart that he picked up a gun and didn’t put it down again until he himself was dead.

Cole: The finale, better than any other episode, brought the show’s disparate strands together in a mostly satisfying way. Instead of ending with Andrew’s self-inflicting gunshot wound, the show lingered for another 10 minutes to examine how all of his victims otherwise would be impacted by his death. Aside from the Versace portion of the story, the other plot they completely dropped was how the investigation into these murders was hindered by homophobia in the police department. Like, raise your hand if you completely forgot that Dascha Polanco and Will Chase were even on this show. Total waste.

But Max Greenfield, who played an HIV-positive junkie who befriends Andrew, has this long-overdue hero’s speech in the interrogation room after Versace is shot that makes it all worth it. “You were disgusted by him long before he became disgusting,” he sneers at the cops after they press him for information about his friend. It reminded me how this show has gifted us with so many compelling insights into what it was like to be gay at that time, whether it be the experience of a drifter in Miami Beach, a closeted and elderly businessman, the world’s most famous fashion designer or a Marine struggling with his sexuality. We so rarely get to see such compassionate depictions of gay men on television.

Matt: Oh, precious Max Greenfield ― I don’t like seeing our strapping charmer so disheveled and sickly. But Greenfield got the defining line of the season, spoon-feeding us the overriding theme in typical Ryan Murphy fashion: “Andrew is not hiding; he’s trying to be seen,” he tells Polanco and Chase’s police officers after berating them for only accelerating the hunt now that Cunanan has murdered a celebrity. Everyday gay men don’t matter, just as they didn’t when the federal government ignored AIDS a few years prior. Glitz and glamour rule the day, so it’s no wonder Andrew sought renown.

But that’s also the concept that best served the show’s nonlinear narrative: Hope and despair came hand in hand. One door opened ― romance, tolerance, success, health ― and then another quickly closed, for both Gianni and Andrew. And that’s the real “crime” in this season of “American Crime Story.” Any chance Andrew had of escaping his dastardly father and unstable mother was stymied by a world that failed to teach him how to love himself.

Cole: Taking every gay fiber of my being not to quote RuPaul right now, but I will resist. Unlike Gianni, Andrew absolutely never learned those lessons, and therein lies the power of the effective, albeit obvious, final sequence. The designer is enshrined in eternal glory in his chicest mausoleum you’ve ever seen as his sister weeps over his remains, while Andrew is laid to rest among a seemingly never-ending hallway of no-name corpses before the camera cuts to black.

Matt: And what a stark cut it is, as if every ounce of hopefulness has dissipated along with Andrew’s life. He couldn’t overcome his demons, and he wasn’t clever enough to outwit law enforcement on the path toward a redemption that would never come anyway. How fitting that Andrew is last seen bloody and shirtless, sprawled out on a bed that should have been his haven. Even when the show’s theses become too heavy-handed to bear, there’s a knotty brilliance at its center ― one that’s depressingly acquainted with the stratification of gay tragedy.

‘Assassination Of Gianni Versace’ Is The Best Ryan Murphy Show You Didn’t Watch

Versace: Andrew Cunanan’s Suicide

On the finale episode of American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace, “Alone,” serial killer Andrew Cunanan hides out on a pale-blue house boat in Miami, transfixed by a glowing television screen. When a news break reports that authorities have identified him as the killer of Gianni Versace, Cunanan is not wracked with the panic of a criminal about to be caught. Instead, he’s elated as he drinks champagne, relaxes on the boat’s roof deck, and enjoys his moment of infamy.

As the authorities intensify their manhunt, Max Greenfield’s character,Ronnie, poignantly articulates the most probable motivation behind Cunanan’s murder spree: “Andrew wanted you to know about his pain,” he says, invoking the stigma of Cunanan’s sexual orientation and the trauma of Cunanan’s childhood. “Andrew is not hiding,” Ronnie continues. “He’s trying to be seen.”

In real life, the F.B.I. confirmed as much during a press conference shortly after Cunanan’s death—revealing that, even as authorities closed in on the killer, “he went out in the afternoons and late evening. He was a very visible person, not a recluse, not a shut-in.”

But if that were the case, why did Cunanan kill himself after achieving what he had so desperately wanted all along? It is a question that series star Darren Criss, who plays Cunanan, and American Crime Story writer and executive producer Tom Rob Smith have pondered at length.

“Tom made a really good point that [Andrew] would have been alive to watch Versace’s funeral,” Criss told Vanity Fair’s Still Watching: Versace hosts Joanna Robinson and Richard Lawson on the podcast’s latest episode. Had he watched the star-studded Milan ceremony, which took place one day before Cunanan’s suicide, “[Cunanan] would have seen on television in the front row Elton John, Princess Diana, Trudie Styler, Sting … basically his dream funeral. Literally living through this guy’s death,” Criss continued.

Vanity Fair contributor Maureen Orth, who wrote the book, Vulgar Favors,on which the series is based, reported that a nearby sailboat had been broken into during the same period Cunanan was on the run in Miami. Its owner, upon returning, found “newspapers opened to stories of the Versace killing, including Versace’s hometown paper, Milan’s Corriere della Sera.”

“[Andrew] would have seen his face in every magazine and every newspaper. If you say all he wanted was fame and recognition … he could have been [Charles] Manson,” Criss said, imagining a scenario in which Cunanan did not kill himself. “He could have gone to the trial, he could have gone to prison, he could have been incarcerated and been the stuff of serial-killer legend for the rest of this life.” Series producer Brad Simpson agrees, telling Still Watching: Versace: “He could have been Charlie Manson sitting in prison right now. He could have been O.J. Simpson. He ultimately chose suicide. Andrew is the final victim in the show. We talked about how to show someone going from exhilaration to complete despair.”

But as Ronnie points out on Wednesday’s episode, the consequences of killing a famous person like Gianni Versace are different from the consequences of killing a non-famous person. Cunanan had been able to evade authorities for nearly three months because his murders in multiple states had been clumsily handled by different, uncommunicative jurisdictions. After Cunanan murdered an international celebrity, Gianni Versace, the investigation became more focused and aggressive—involving1,000 agents across the country. According to the F.B.I., this intensity “drove [Cunanan] inside, forced him to change his pattern.”

Cunanan suddenly found himself trapped on the island city of Miami Beach—with airports on full alert, his face papered on posters, and police checkpoints stationed on each causeway connecting the city to the mainland. The media covered the story so exhaustively that, according to Orth, Cunanan’s mother, MaryAnn, was transported from her home by the F.B.I. and hidden in a witness-protection program.

Cunanan spent his final days in a state of desperation, according to a New York Times report that alleged Cunanan “telephoned an acquaintance frantically trying to get a fake passport so he could escape.” (There is no evidence that Cunanan placed a call to his father Pete, or saw his father participate in any televised press interviews, as is dramatized on the TV series. Orth reported that Pete did not return to America, to begin shopping the movie and book rights to his family’s story, until after Cunanan had killed himself.) Surrounded with no way to escape, Cunanan was forced to make a quick decision about his fate. And rather than enjoy his criminal infamy, Cunanan shot himself with the gun he stole from his first victim when he heard someone enter the houseboat.

The person who stumbled upon Cunanan’s hideaway—just 41 blocks north of Versace’s mansion—was the houseboat’s caretaker, Fernando Carreira.When Carreira checked the boat, he was alarmed to see that the lock was unlatched, the lights were on, and the drapes were drawn. Inside, he noticed two sandals and a sofa that had been fashioned into a bed. Overhead, he heard a gun shot in the second-floor master bedroom. He ran outside and called his son, who phoned 911. Police arrived within four minutes—followed by a battalion of helicopters, boats, and dogs.

About four hours later, “police fired eight rounds of tear gas or ‘flash-bang’ grenades into the boat. They shouted ‘Come out! Come out!’ Eventually, eight officers—huddled behind shields—stormed the boat.”

When authorities entered the premises, they found Cunanan dead from a self-inflicted gunshot in the master bedroom. Orth described the grim scene in Vulgar Favors: “Andrew, eyes open, with several days’ growth of beard, was lying in a pool of blood on a pillow propped on another pillow. He had shot himself through the mouth. Blood from his ears, nose, and mouth had caked, and the pillow was also soaked in blood.”

“Is it shame? Is it isolation? Desperation? We don’t know,” series producer Nina Jacobson explained on Still Watching: Versace. “We didn’t want to project a full contrition and shame on him because we don’t have the evidence for it. We don’t know what his mindset was. We always had to walk this line of wanting to understand him without ever glorifying him. He is both the protagonist and the villain of the story.”

Today, a cursory Internet search will lead you to video footage taken inside the houseboat by police in the aftermath—with a shaky camcorder leading you through Cunanan’s final lair. A downstairs living room features a white couch with its cushions pulled off. A coffee table holds rubbing alcohol, gauze bandages, a bloody bandage, and an empty Tylenol bottle—to treat a stomach wound—as well as a stack of magazines including his beloved Vogue. A bathtub is stuffed full of fast-food wrappers—a stark contrast to the luxurious living conditions Cunanan had grown accustomed to while living with Norman Blachford, and a visual that must have been difficult to stomach for a man who told elaborate lies about growing up in incredible wealth.

At the end of her own book, Orth rationalizes Cunanan’s spree and suicide as follows:

In an effort to avoid the humiliation of his own failed life, Andrew Cunanan, who had wasted his gifts and lived resolutely on the surface, struck back. Fueled by drugs and filled with rage, his unmitigated ruin also drove him to destroy others, including the only person he had probably ever loved. With the exception of William Reese, each one of Andrew Cunanan’s victims—Jeff Trail, David Madson, Lee Miglin, and Gianni Versace—was like a piece of himself. In the end, Andrew Cunanan was a sad testament to vulgar, unrealized aspiration. The little boy who wanted a big house with an ocean view died hunted on the water with a gun for his last companion.

Criss, trying to understand why Cunanan ultimately killed himself, gives another take: “There has to have been something in him, some sense of regret and remorse. Something that I kind of came to is that, if he had stretched this out, he would no longer be in control of his own narrative. It’s out of his hands, it becomes part of the media. If taking one’s life is the ultimate arbitration of control, then that is the final act of ‘this is my story.’ And he literally took it for himself—look at us, 20 years later, talking about it. So he did get what he wanted, in this sort of twisted way.”

Versace: Andrew Cunanan’s Suicide

‘The Assassination Of Gianni Versace’ Season Finale: What Does Designer’s Murder Mean 20 Years Later?

Tonight we returned to the July 15, 1997 crime scene where serial killer Andrew Cunanan guns down famed Italian designer Gianni Versace on the steps of his Miami Beach mansion, and a manhunt pursues. Having once been tested with an I.Q of 147, Cunanan was brilliant and he was able to dodge the Feds and change his appearance not just for another eight days in Miami Beach after his notorious crime, but for roughly three months prior after taking the lives of naval officer Jeffrey Trail, lover David Madson, Chicago real estate developer Lee Miglin, and caretaker William Reese.

Cunanan ducks and covers in a house boat, where he watches the media coverage of his slaughter, that is until the police descend upon him, and we see that he commits suicide with the same gun he used to kill Madson, Reese and Versace.

Some have criticized this second season of American Crime Story for not having the resonance of 2016’s The People v. O.J. Simpson. In an era where social media over hypes headlines, that tabloid trial continued to ring true 20-plus years later, not only in the way it was originally covered by the media, but it also touched upon the reality that times haven’t changed. As series EP/writer Scott Alexander assessed during a panel for the show, bad relationships between police departments and blacks continues to exist, ditto for gender inequality in the workplace as we saw portrayed in Sarah Paulson’s Emmy-winning performance of prosecutor Marcia Clark.

If there was a gripe by critics over the Assassination of Gianni Versace, it was a superficial one, as the miniseries across nine episodes didn’t dote on the ins and outs of the intriguing fashion designer’s life, rather the deplorable murderer Cunanan. However, much like O.J. Simpson focused on how a fractured American has remained exactly that, Gianni Versace zeroed on the complexities that the gay community weathered in the late ’90s, and how homophobia continues to pervade society.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the piercing speech delivered by Ronnie (Max Greenfield turning in an Emmy worthy performance) to the Feds after they bring him in for questioning over Cunanan’s whereabouts. Wiry and HIV-positive, Ronnie berates them for their insensitivity and idiocy in not catching Cunanan sooner while he was in plain sight in Miami (As EP Tom Rob Smith said at TCA, the Cunanan murder case “was the largest FBI fail of all-time.”)

Ronnie blasts, “The other cops here, they weren’t searching so hard were they, why is that? Because he killed a bunch of nobody gays?…You know what the truth is, you were disgusted by him, long before he became disgusting. You’re so used to us lurking in the shadows. Ya know, most of us, we’re obliged! People like me, we just drift away, we get sick, nobody cares, but Andrew was vain. He wanted you to know about his pain, he wanted you to hear, he wanted you …he wanted you to know about being born a lie. Andrew is not hiding. He’s trying to be seen.”

EP Ryan Murphy at TCA said that Versace’s murder was a “political” one and that Cunanan was “a person who specifically went out of his way to shame and out people…He was having a form of payback for a life he could not live.” At one point Murphy and the American Crime EPs considering putting Cunanan’s name in the title, but they decided they didn’t want to glamorize him.

At a post season finale screening Q&A Monday night at the DGA Theatre in Hollywood, EPs and cast members discussed the personal impact for them working on the show, and how the gay community has been effected in the years since Versace’s murder.

Judith Light, who plays Marilyn Miglin, the wife of Cunanan victim Lee Miglin, said that Gianni Versace, “is a cultural and historical event, and that’s what I think is so powerful about it. And when we talk about the time it happened and the love that people had for each other, particularly Antonio and Gianni, and that relationship is iconic in the sense that we’re still living in a time of homophobia. And what this does, it talks about that and brings it present and reminds us where we were in the ‘90s and talks about that we’re still not finished with it today.”

“Had Andrew had a life where he could have been open and lived his life in a way that was supportive to him, these things may not have happened,” added Light.

“We live in divided times about how separate we all are, but it (American Crime Story) shows how interconnected we are” said Tom Rob Smith about how Cunanan’s atrocities didn’t just damage those in rich Italian circles, but extended to various society levels, rich and poor.  Smith wrote tonight’s episode “Alone,” which was directed by Dan Minahan.

One of the more intriguing turn of events following Versace’s murder which tonight’s season 2 finale briefly covers is how the fashion designer’s boyfriend Antonio D’Amico (Ricky Martin) was arguably casted out by the Versace family following the murder; blocked from taking ownership of the Lake Como property promised to him by Gianni no thanks to sister Donatella and the label’s board. The miniseries shows Antonio taking his life with a bottle of pills, when in fact that’s debated whether he actually went that far in his depression following Gianni’s murder. What is known is that Antonio is alive and well, with his own fashion label in Northern Italy, and a reported $30K a month payout for life in Versace’s will. Overall, Donatella and Antonio were never on good terms.  

Having been a closeted gay during pinnacles of his pop music career, and finally coming out in 2010, playing Antonio was both a cathartic and painful experience for Ricky Martin.

“I feel so much sadness seeing this last episode, and also a lot of anger; this could happen over and over again,” said Martin about the struggles which gay men go through in a homophobic society. He is proud that Versace possessed a strong courage to be out. As Martin confessed on stage the other night he personally “made a lot of my partners hide” and endured “a lot of self hate.”

But despite reliving the pain, there was a positive, resilient takeaway from The Assassination of Gianni Versace for Martin.

Says the Grammy winner, “I just want to be louder, louder and louder”

‘The Assassination Of Gianni Versace’ Season Finale: What Does Designer’s Murder Mean 20 Years Later?

‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story’ Finale Recap: The End of Andrew Cunanan

The second season of American Crime Story ends where it began, with the titular assassination of Gianni Versace. After going back in time throughout Andrew’s life, the finale returns to Florida with Andrew on the run from the FBI, stuck watching his own life’s story play out on the news.

In many ways, this season can be split into three parts. There are the first two episodes and this finale, all about Versace in Florida and the manhunt for Andrew Cuanan. Then we had the third, fourth and fifth episodes, all about the start of the killing spree with Jeff Trail, David Madson and Lee Miglin. Then we had the past three episodes, all about Andrew’s psychology from his childhood to his rise and fall.

Andrew on the Run

After a seven-episode detour in time, from Chicago and Minneapolis to California and the Philippines, the finale takes us back to July 15, 1997 in Miami Beach, the day of the assassination of Gianni Versace. We see the murder again, then at night Andrew breaks into a houseboat and watches the news reports where he has been identified as the prime suspect. Andrew seems pleased with himself and laughs at the speculation that the murder was a hit ordered by the Italian mob.

The next morning he steals a car and tries to flee, but there are police checkpoints everywhere so he’s stuck on the houseboat, reduced to digging through the trash for scraps and even attempting to eat dog food.

Meanwhile, the FBI questions Ronnie (Max Greenfield), who gets snarky with the police about how they didn’t care about Andrew’s killing spree until he murdered a celebrity. He claims that society was disgusted by Andrew because he’s gay long before he started killing anyone and now Andrew isn’t hiding, he’s trying to be seen.

Andrew Cunanan, This Is Your Life

Most of the episode focuses on Andrew watching the news, offering a glimpse at his own life and what his story will be. He seems happy to have his name linked with Versace’s, but less pleased by the rest. His mom is being questioned by police and harassed by reporters. His best friend Lizzie begs Andrew to turn himself in because she knows how much he cares about what other people think of him.

A report about David Madson’s father defending his son as a victim seems to enrage Andrew, a reminder of the life he dreamed about having that ended in tragedy.

Andrew also sees Marilyn Miglin, marking the return of the best part of this series, Judith Light. She is in Tampa for an appearance on the home shopping channel, talking about her father dying when she was young and how that impacted her, forcing her to get a job and work hard. She talks about wanting to go back in time and tell her younger self how special she was. This seems to resonate with Andrew and he resents the fact that Marilyn is now successful but he isn’t.

Andrew has an emotional breakdown and calls his dad in the Philippines. Pete is profiting from the interviews he’s doing because his son is in the news. Andrew cries and begs his dad for help. Pete asks where he is and promises that he’ll fly right over to help him.

The next night Andrew sees his dad on the news, saying that his son is not gay. He adds that they talk regularly and Andrew is too smart to get caught by the cops, saying that he’s talking to Hollywood about selling the movie rights to Andrew’s life story. Andrew is furious that is dad is selling him out like this and he shoots the TV.

Gianni’s Funeral

The show jumps to Italy a week after the murder. Antonio and Donatella are preparing for Gianni’s funeral. He wants to spend his days at one of Gianni’s Italian homes to stay close to him, but Donetlla informs him that the homes are all owned by the company, effectively leaving him with nothing. He also gets snubbed by the priest at the service.

The only purpose is to highlight the difference between the two major figures in the series. While Gianni’s funeral is ornate in an Italian cathedral, with Princess Diana and Elton John in attendance, Andrew is stuck watching it on a houseboat while eating dog food and seeing cockroaches crawl along the floor.

I also wonder if this is a little Easter Egg for the second season of Ryan Murphy’s Feud, which will center on Diana and Charles, because Gianni’s funeral takes place a little over one month before her death. It would be kind of cool if FX connected the two shows and included Diana attending Gianni’s funeral in Feud season 2.

The End of Andrew Cunanan

Eventually, the owner of the houseboat shows up and sees that it’s been broken into. He enters with a gun, but Andrew fires a warning shot. The man runs away and calls the police, who swam the scene. Andrew sees the whole thing play out on the news, knowing that he’s surrounded. The police try to contact him, but he refuses. The police storm the houseboat. Andrew sits on a bed, puts his gun into his mouth and pulls the trigger.

In a beautiful piece of symmetry, the show immediately cuts back to Andrew’s meeting with Gianni at the opera. You may remember this scene from the premiere, when the show abruptly cut away from it to the moment when Andrew shot Versace. This time it picks up right where the scene left off last time.

Andrew talks about fearing that no one will think he’s special. Gianni tells him that it’s not about persuading people, he should just go out and do it. Andrew desperately wants to work with him because Versace is the only man who believes that Andrew is special. Andrew tries to kiss him, but gets rejected. Gianni just wants him to be inspired.

The Aftermath

Following Andrew’s suicide, Marilyn is informed and she’s glad it’s done. She also reveals that she’s received letters about the charitable things her husband did that he never told her about.

In Italy, Donatella tells Antonio that the morning Gianni died he called her to talk about a runway show she was doing. She was annoyed that he was micromanaging her so when he called back 30 minutes later, she ignored the call. The show ends with Donatella visiting her brother’s tomb, cut with Andrew’s meager tomb as well as Antonio making a failed suicide attempt.

It’s all a little rushed, perhaps because Penelope Crruz and Ricky Martin were underused and their characters were underdeveloped throughout the series. The finale tries to make it seem like Versace was an important part of this story, even though he was largely absent from most of it.

In the end, the show offers a brief disclaimer, saying that while the series was inspired by a true story, “Some events are combined or imagined for dramatic and interpretive purposes.” In other words, some of it was kind of true, but they made up some stuff. That feels like the kind of warning that should have appeared at the beginning of the series, not after it’s all over.

‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story’ Finale Recap: The End of Andrew Cunanan