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PASADENA, Calif. — The most interesting character in FX’s heartbreaking and engrossing “The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story” (10 p.m. Jan. 17) is not Gianni Versace.

Versace (Edgar Ramirez) is probably the fifth most interesting character after his killer, Andrew Cunanan (Darren Criss), and three of Cunanan’s earlier, largely unknown victims.

Featuring an Emmy-worthy performance by Mr. Criss, “Versace” is as much a true-crime story as it is an exploration of the cultural climate for gay men in America in the 1990s. Through this lens viewers see the cruelty and damaging unfairness of the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy and the pain of alienation for gay men who felt they could not be open with their families.

“Versace” is not perfect — some episodes meander a bit and anytime the story takes viewers back to Versace and away from the other victims, it becomes less compelling — but it marks an early, strong entry for one of the best series of 2018.

The series begins with Versace’s 1997 Miami Beach murder and each episode that follows goes further back in time, tracing Cunanan’s path from fame-and-wealth-seeking compulsive liar and fabulist to murderer. It’s not an effort on the part of producers to humanize Cunanan as much as it is an attempt to explain how he could commit such atrocious acts of violence.

There are a bounty of strong supporting players in “Versace,” including Mike Farrell (“MAS*H”), Judith Light (“Transparent”), Finn Wittrock (“American Horror Story”) and newcomer Cody Fern, but the true breakout performance comes from Mr. Criss, who capably inhabits the role of the sometimes desperate, sometimes pathetic and often creepy Cunanan.

“Versace” may not be quite on the level of the last “American Crime Story” installment, “The People v. O.J. Simpson,” but as true crime TV dramatizations go, it comes close.

‘Versace’ veracity

But here’s an important aspect of “Versace” that viewers need to understand: It’s a well-made drama but large swaths of it — particularly in episodes four, five and six that purport to show Cunanan with his earlier victims — are entirely speculative. No one knows the details of what happened between Cunanan and his victims because Cunanan and the victims were all dead before anyone could investigate the case.

The Versace family has disavowed the series issuing a statement to say “this TV series should only be considered as a work of fiction.“

Writer Tom Rob Smith (“London Spy”), working from the Maureen Orth book “Vulgar Favors,” acknowledged that he often had to begin with “a tiny pinpoint of a fact” and build the story from there, particularly when Cunanan is shown holding one of his victims at gunpoint.

“So we are trying to imagine a journey. We know the, sort of, shape of it,” he said. “We know that they must have gotten to a point where they were, at some level, working together. He wasn’t running away. Was he at gunpoint? And then, at some point, he was begging [based on the wounds on his body]. What was that conversation like? So you have these tiny points of truth, and you then try to connect the tissue between it. But I would never use the word ‘embellishing’ or ‘making up.’ It’s trying to join those pinpoints.”

Some may also quibble with the show’s title. To suggest the murder was for political reasons requires knowing what Cunanan was thinking, but executive producer Ryan Murphy defends the title.

“This was a person who targeted people specifically to shame them and to out them and to have a form of payback for a life that he felt he could not live,” Mr. Murphy said at an FX press conference earlier this month. “I do feel like any time that you methodically plot to kill someone with pain and murder in your heart to expose them for something, that is an assassination and so I feel like the title was important politically for us to say, and I also believe that that’s what it was.”

Mr. Smith said despite killing multiple people in a spree, he sees Cunanan as more of a terrorist than as a serial killer.

“What happens is once he’s lost everything and realizes that he can’t create, you have this fundamental choice in society,” Mr. Smith said, “which is either you build something that impresses someone, which is very hard, takes a lot of work, or if you can’t do that but you don’t want to accept anonymity, you can try to rip something down.”

Tuned In: Another excellent true crime tale in FX’s ‘Versace’