Tag: nina jacobson

American Crime Story Producers Are Hunting for Their Own Making a Murderer Season

Producing super-team Brad Simpson and Nina Jacobson are responsible, individually and collectively, for major money-making franchises like Diary of a Wimpy Kid and the Hunger Games. When they decided to try their hand at TV in 2016, with American Crime Story: The People v. O.J. Simpson, they hit ratings and awards-season gold. The second season of the FX franchise, titled The Assassination of Gianni Versace, wraps up Wednesday night to a slightly more muted reception, and the pair acknowledge that fans have wondered why there wasn’t more of the titular Versace family in this show.

“We’ve obviously seen the tweets,” Simpson said as part of a wide-ranging interview with Vanity Fair’s Still Watching: Versace podcast. “ ‘Oh, The Assassination of Gianni Versace is really Andrew [Cunanan]’s story.]’ There’s a lot of surprise and I think we were a little underprepared.” Jacobson and Simpson went on to explain how that reaction will impact the future of the American Crime Story franchise, and why, perhaps, we might not see any famous name at all in future season titles.

“We had done the People v. O.J. Simpson, which wasn’t really about O.J. Simpson,” Brad Simpson explains. “The surprise of that show was that O.J. Simpson was really a supporting character. After the first two episodes he just sits in court until the finale. Really it was about the lawyers. We were surprised by the way people thought the Versaces would be leads instead of supporting characters.”

According to Simpson, when the Versace team was figuring out episodes 3 and 4 of the season, which involve the deaths of Lee Miglin, Jeff Trail, David Madson, and William Reese, they felt it would be “disrespectful” to cut away from the deaths of these four men simply to spend time in the more luxurious and high-profile world of the Versaces. Though he concedes the story of the Versaces after Gianni’s murder was more “melodramatic,” he worried delving too deep into that world would result in criticizing the famous fashion family and break the rule of the season, which was to not “demonize” the victims in any way.

The finale, which was edited together a good deal after the first eight episodes, due to some availabilities, does, however, spend more time with Penelope Cruz’s Donatella Versace and Ricky Martin’s Antonio D’Amico—as well as a brief fantasy sequence with Edgar Ramirez’s Gianni Versace. But Simpson insists the increased Versace presence in the finale is not a reaction to audiences “clamoring” for more Cruz and Martin. “I honestly think if we had given people more Versace, they would have gotten tired of it.”

As for the future of the franchise, Jacobson said they are currently “up to our neck” in developing the next few seasons, which will reportedly still cover both the Hurricane Katrina disaster and the Bill Clinton/Monica Lewinsky scandal. She acknowledges that pursuing true-crime stories that serve as a mirror for the clash between “who we say we are as Americans and who we actually are as Americans” doesn’t always result in the “fastest turnaround time,” but neither producer sounds at all rushed in their process of trying to get it right.

In fact, Simpson explains, that in order to find a story that says something “bigger and deeper and more disturbing about America,” the duo are “on the hunt for a story that people don’t know,” similar to Netflix’s smash true-crime docuseries, Making a Murderer. They want an “untold story for future seasons” and tease that everyone should “stay tuned” for that announcement. In the meantime, however, for all the fans who are still cross over the missing Versaces in The Assassination of Gianni Versace, Brad Simpson has a promise to make: “We’ll be more careful on how we title future seasons.”

American Crime Story Producers Are Hunting for Their Own Making a Murderer Season

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

Cody Fern is ‘American Crime Story: Versace’s Major Discovery

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Don’t be diverted by the sleek clothes, vibrant colors or transformative work of its lead actors — the crown jewel in the medusa head of “American Crime Story: Versace” is necomer Cody Fern.

From a small mining town in Australia, with only one prior credit to his name, Fern plays the little-known David Madson — a pawn in the game of serial killer Andrew Cunanan, who famously gunned down designer Gianni Versace in Miami in 1997.

That Fern would stand out with his famous costars Penelope Cruz, Edgar Ramirez and Darren Criss is as unlikely as it is exhilarating. His performance as Madson is the show’s true revelation, despite the halo Ramirez brings Gianni, the quiet dignity Cruz affords Donatella and the textured madness Criss gives us as Cunanan.

Let us explain. (Warning: Do not read ahead if you aren’t caught up on the show.)

“Versace,” produced by Ryan Murphy and his “People v. O.J.” team of Brad Simpson and Nina Jacobson, shows Cunanan’s five-person murder spree in reverse. It hooks you with the spectacle and tragedy of Versace being gunned down on the marble steps of his palazzo and walks you back through Cunanan’s horrible journey to that moment.

On this timeline, we meet his victims and friends Madson and Jeff Trail (Finn Wittrock). At the top of the fourth episode, we witness Fern’s big moment: Cunanan violently bashes Trail in the skull and face 28 times with a hammer.

The violence is implicit and the camera doesn’t show the murder, just a slow push on Fern. He conveys abject horror and shock at the act unfolding in front of him. Only after the screams and grunts are through do we see a blood-soaked Cunanan, who immediately retreats into the arms of the terrified Fern, looking for approval.

Madson had a dog, and the animal used in the scene had such a strong reaction that the actors had to do a second take, Jacobson told TheWrap.

“The intensity of that murder was present there at the shoot,” she said. “What’s so great about Cody’s performance is that the horror of the murder is playing out across him.”

After the murder, Cunanan seizes on the violence and confusion to make Madson feel complicit. He pulls him into the shower and washes the blood from them both. He watches as Madson dresses and struggles to find an appropriate response to the crime he’s just witnessed.

Cunanan promises no one else will get hurt if Madson flees the scene with him, so the men set off together on a morbid little road trip. Here they both begin to weigh the consequences of their choices.

“We watched a lot of road movies from the 1990s, there was this trend of road movies. ‘Natural Born Kilers,’ ‘Wild at Heart,’ ‘Thelma and Louise.’ [Episode writer] Tom Rob Smith watched those, and we talked about this being a twisted version of that,” Simpson told TheWrap.

Indeed, Cunanan joyously belts out Technotronic’s “Pump Up The Jam” while Madson stares off into the distance, drudging up his internalized shame over being gay, and wondering how news of the crime will hurt his family, which struggled with his coming out, years before.

“The question becomes, ‘How redeemable is Andrew and how redeemable am I?” Fern said of the episode, speaking from the set of his new gig on “House of Cards.” “How complicit am I in the death of this other person, my best friend? Could I run now if I wanted to?”

To prepare for the episode, Fern said he read the famous testimony of Manson Family member Linda Kasabian, a key witness in the defense of the Tate-LaBianca murders.

“You got the sense that the light went out behind her eyes, ” Fern said.

The episode reaches a second crescendo when the fugitives stop at a roadside bar. Fern’s Madson keeps reaching the end of his emotional rope, only to find more rope. A lounge lizard (played by indie goddess Amie Mann in a stealth cameo) sings an impossibly sad cover of The Cars song’ “Drive.”

Madson escapes to the bathroom, where he breaks the glass of a small rectangular window above the toilet — “Maybe he fits through it, maybe he doesn’t,” Jacobson said.

Back in the bar, reality rushes to Cunanan and tears stream down his face.

When he looks up, Madson has returned to the table. The sweater he wrapped around his fist to punch the window is now tied on his waist.

“The shame, it’s something we wanted to explore in this entire season. Think about Versace. He came out before Ellen, and there were so few role models and people you could look up to. There was so much internalized homophobia, it’s so present with both of those characters, both Madson and Jeff,” Jacobson said.

“It’s more than the murder for Madson. It’s ‘People know you’re guilty for being gay, and guilty of being gay.’ That Cunanan plays on that is so disturbing,” Simpson said.

Tom Rob Smith’s teleplay for the episode is titled “House by the Lake.” That’s where the episode ends, and we won’t spoil what fate awaits the men there.

Cody Fern is ‘American Crime Story: Versace’s Major Discovery

Why ‘Versace’ Shifted Its Narrative Away From the Fashion Designer

[This story contains spoilers from the third episode of The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story.]

American Crime Story creator Ryan Murphy has said that while the first season of his FX anthology series, The People v. O.J. Simpson, was a courtroom drama, he conceived the second, The Assassination of Gianni Versace, as a thriller.

While the first two episodes of the season focused on the fashion designer’s slaying and the hunt for his killer, Andrew Cunanan (Darren Criss), the third installment focused on the murder of Chicago real estate titan Lee Miglin (Mike Farrell) — and didn’t actually include Versace (Edgar Ramirez), his partner, Antonio D’Amico (Ricky Martin) or his sister, Donatella Versace (Penelope Cruz) at all.

“Thrillers to me are about a sense of unease,” explained London Spy creator Tom Rob Smith, who wrote all nine episodes of the season. In The Assassination of Gianni Versace, which is told in reverse chronological order, the audience knows that Cunanan has left a trail of bodies across the United States — but each subsequent episode focuses on those people the FBI Most Wanted serial killer leaves in his wake.

“We have these amazing people, not just Versace but Lee Miglin, [first two victims] David Madson, Jeffrey Trail, [carjacking victim] William Reese, these figures that you fall in love with and that you are fearful for because Andrew is in their world and you know that Andrew is dangerous and destructive. There’s that permanent sense of tension that I think makes it a thriller. You’re unsettled. You want people to live when you know that they’re not going to live, and I think that’s the unsettling nature of our thriller,” Smith told The Hollywood Reporter.

While Versace might be the namesake of the show, the fact that he is not included in the third episode at all was in the interest of honoring Cunanan’s other victims rather than a slight to the designer.

“We did not want to just focus on the most famous victim,” executive producer Nina Jacobson told THR. “The more we researched the more you really felt the enormous sense of loss about the lives of these other people and the intimacy of these murders of the people he knew so well, and what they meant to him. We got so caught up in those characters. We wanted to tell their stories as well, and Tom just rendered them so completely. And the actors got under their skin so that once you got to know them, you wanted to have that time with them, and you wanted to feel that they got the same kind of attention and respect, as characters, even though they were not the names that people remembered.”

“A Random Killing” focused on Cunanan’s third and fourth victims, Lee Miglin and William Reese. While Reese was killed when Cunanan needed a new escape vehicle, the episode makes the case that Miglin not only knew Cunanan, but that they’d also been intimate. The family has consistently denied that Miglin was gay, but journalist and Vulgar Favors author Maureen Orth, who wrote the book on which the season is based, said her sources told her otherwise.

“His family always maintained very, very strongly that he was not [gay]. I did talk to a number of people, one of whom was a young male prostitute who said that he had had an assignation with both of them — I don’t know if his identity was 100 percent, but that’s who he thought he was,” Orth told THR. “A lot of people I talked to said they thought that Andrew was the guy they met in the airport when the Miglins were going to go with their son on a vacation, but it was not 100 percent. But the idea that the way he was killed would be evaluated by authorities as a crime of passion, or a crime of total hatred — you don’t usually kill that viciously when you don’t know the victim, according to what the police told me.”

Added Smith, “there is a lot of indication that he … had sex with men. There are escorts on the record, and there are lots of indications that he had met Andrew before, and they had a long-running sexual relationship. And how he constructed his life, which is, ‘To survive in this world you need to get married, you need to build a respectable facade around yourself.’ It boils down to, I guess, ‘How do you survive in this world if this world despises you?’”

The episode featured intimate scenes between Miglin and Cunanan, but also centered on the pain of Miglin’s widow, Marilyn, played by Judith Light. Light told THR that she approached her role sensitively, especially because it will unearth decades-old pain that the Miglin family has faced.

“I know that it could be painful, and I have sorrow for that. I don’t want anybody to ever, ever be hurt,” she said. “I also know that it’s a theatrical event, and I know that people want to know about it, and I hope that they will appreciate it in that light and give great care to the thoughts of the families as well.” But, Light said, she feels confident that everyone involved in Versace took the victims’ families feelings into account and approached the story with care, because “it’s incumbent upon us to do so.”

Why ‘Versace’ Shifted Its Narrative Away From the Fashion Designer

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January 31, 2018: Hour 1 | Here & Now

Also, the latest season of FX’s “American Crime Story” focuses on the murder of fashion designer Gianni Versace, who was gunned down on the front steps of his home in Miami Beach, Florida, on July 15, 1997. The show’s executive producers join us to discuss “The Assassination of Gianni Versace." 

‘American Crime Story’: FX’s Nina Jacobson And Brad Simpson Talk About The Challenges Of Creating Socially Conscious TV

At times it feels as though Ryan Murphy has an overwhelming number of shows, but there’s something special about American Crime Story. The first season of the anthology series, The People v. O.J. Simpson, swept the world by storm, dominating both critical conversations and achieving stellar ratings. For its second season, The Assassination of Gianni Versace may not be as all-encompassing as the first season of the show. However, there’s a sense of urgency, consciousness, and care about the portrayal of these real-life people baked into the DNA of Versace that makes this season a worthy sequel to the O.J. season of the show.

The creators of American Crime Story know the show’s reputation and strengths and are cautious about capturing the perfect balance of pulpy drama and socially conscious storytelling. As we’re in the middle of the first big show of 2018, Decider had the opportunity to Nina Jacobson and Brad Simpson, executive producers for American Crime Story and FX’s upcoming musical drama Pose. The duo discussed the importance of telling the Versace and Cunanan story, the challenges of Ryan Murphy’s brand of storytelling, what it’s like working with FX, and what’s going on with the Monica Lewinsky and Hurricane Katrina seasons of American Crime Story.

“The first thing that Ryan pulled for was that we shoot in Miami, which is hard to do on a basic cable TV show,” Simpson said when asked about The Assassination of Gianni Versace‘s gorgeous cinematography. To achieve the show’s highly stylized and bright look, the team brought in two directors of photography — Nelson Cragg, who also directed Episode 2 “Manhunt” and worked on the O.J. season, and Simon Dennis, who worked on six episodes of the series.

“There’s a consistency [to the look of the show], but the show is darker and less vivid as we go back in time and see some of the murders. But also Ryan really wanted pink to be a central color of the show,” he said. “It’s important metaphorically because the show is in many ways about being gay, and pink is associated with that, but also we thought it was important because it was a big color in Miami, and it plays throughout the show with very clean lines.”

Simpson also revealed that the team used American Gigolo and the original Miami Vice for inspiration. “We hope that people enjoy the look while also getting more and more unnerved by it,” Simpson said.

The real story of Andrew Cunanan‘s murder spree was fairly sensationalized. However, the team was careful to be sensitive to these victims’ stories and portray them as people first. “The only victim that people really knew anything about was Versace and we wanted — to the best of our abilities — to tell the story of these other lives that were lost and for them to not sort of be lost in the shuffle of the celebrity victim who was the final victim and the one that everybody knew about,” Jacobson said. The team wasn’t able to learn much about William Reese, the victim who was murdered for his truck. However, they were able to expound on the stories of three of Cunanan’s other victims —Lee Miglin, David Madsen, and Jeff Trail.

“They had such complex stories to be told,” she said. “So much of what they experienced, the themes of homophobia and shame, the policies of being out at that time [are relevant], and we actually felt that rather than sensationalizing those murders, we wanted to humanize those victims.”

Though FX’s series largely sticks to its source material, there is a key difference between Maureen Orth’s book Vulgar Favors and The Assassination of Gianni Versace. While Orth outlines police missteps and the media’s response to this case, Versace largely glosses these details. When asked why these elements were excluded, Jacobson pointed to editing.

“A lot of details from the book were in our script and were shot. And then through the editorial process we found that sort of where you wanted to be was you with the people who were the center of the story,” she said. “Part of it was the difficulty that, because it was this national manhunt with different states involved, there wasn’t necessarily one person or one character story that you could tell of somebody who was on the hunt, putting the clues together. So we didn’t feel as though we had as much character drama coming from the police investigation side.”

Just as The People v. O.J. Simpson was just as much about race relations as it was about national scandal, The Assassination of Gianni Versace is equally about these horrific murders as it is about homophobia and what it was like to be gay during this time. The Versace season is one of the best forms of socially conscious television, a brand Murphy has perfected. However, there are challenges that come with creating TV this way.

“I think the central thing is that you can’t start with the issues, you know? We like a good page turner, in terms of our movies, in terms of our TV shows. Ryan understands, and in a weird way he’s sort of been able to cloak shows that actually have a lot of radical change under just really good storytelling,” Simpson said. “I think Glee did a lot of hurrying up the acceptance among millennials and teaching their parents about difference and homosexuality.”

Simpson admitted that when Murphy first presented the Versace story to them, they weren’t very familiar with all of Cunanan’s murders and didn’t fully see the larger meaning. “As we got into it we realized this is a show about what it was like to be gay during this incredibly complicated time in America. People were trying to come out of the closet across the country, and half the people were trying to shove them back into that closet,” he said. “We’re able to tell that story because it’s a really griping story about this really griping thriller. And I think that’s the secret sauce for Ryan and what we’re interested in too. This sort of literary pulp is compulsive, but it has something to say.”

Simpson expects Pose, FX’s 1980s musical that currently has the largest transgender cast ever announced for a scripted series, to have that same balance. “What Ryan’s doing essentially is telling a musical about people’s hopes and dreams. I think that’s the reason an audience is going to connect to it,” he said. “That’s exactly what makes for compelling TV.”

Jacobson also explained how timeliness has effected both seasons of American Crime Story. “So many of the cases of black deaths at the hands of police were unfolding just right when we were writing and producing O.J., so it felt incredibly immediate even though it was a period piece,” she said. “[Versace] too is a period piece, but this was a time when I was coming out.”

“Versace is the first, really the first major designer to come out not because he was visibly ill with AIDs, which the only other out designers were dead. They had come out because they were visibly ill, and that was the final image that people had of them,” Jacobson said. “Ellen wasn’t out yet. Elton John was out, but very few other celebrities were. And certainly I would say I remember few women were out at that time and how few role models there were. You tend to tell stories that you identify with, that speak to you in a way that moves you, and for us this was a story that moved us.”

Speaking of timely stories, when asked if there had been any talks about moving up the Monica Lewinsky season of American Crime Story in the wake of the #MeToo movement, Simpson those conversations have happened, though nothing is official yet.

“I think we’re kind of glad that we didn’t do Monica right after O.J. I think that this conversation [in Hollywood about sexual misconduct] will inform how we do it. I think that it will inform our perspective on it in a way that’s probably good and cause us to explore issues of consent and what it means to be in a relationship with a powerful man and a younger woman that maybe wouldn’t have been as nuanced before this conversation,” he said. “We might have focused more on the politics. But all of these [shows], we handcraft them … the reason we haven’t been rushing things on the air and pressed pause on Katrina is because we want them all to have resonance.”

As for Katrina, the Five Days at Memorial season is still happening, but there are no official developments yet. “We have a writer working on it,” Simpson said. “We decided to stop announcing when we’ll in production on things because we’ll be in production when the scripts come in, right? We’re hopeful that this new approach is going to be the right one.”

For FX’s part, from Donald Glover to Noah Hawley, the network has been outspoken about allowing its creators to take their time when it comes to producing quality seasons of new shows. “We put a lot of work into a few things, and they’re appreciative of that. They only make pilots that they think they want to program, and they’re not throwing things against the wall,” Simpson said. “I think it’s the smartest group of people working in TV. And it’s been great because our first couple of seasons of working on TV and working with Ryan, who’s also been a great mentor to us, has also coincided with John Landgraf’s team really getting recognized for what they do. As we watch shows like The Americans and Atlanta get noticed along with our shows, we feel like we’re in great company.”

As for FX’s future, the executive producers seemed optimistic about that as well. When asked how she thought Disney’s acquisition of Fox might effect FX, Jacobson said her former employer likely bought Fox because of its content. “It’s been a long time since I’ve worked there, and a lot has changed since I’ve worked there,” she said. “The offerings, I think, from Fox and FX are quite different, and I would assume that … they want those differences in terms of launching Hulu as a major competitor to Netflix and Amazon. But I have to assume they bought Fox because they see the talent that’s there and the library of great shows, and they want some of the differentiation.”

‘American Crime Story’: FX’s Nina Jacobson And Brad Simpson Talk About The Challenges Of Creating Socially Conscious TV