American Crime Story premieres with a new murder, and a new approach

“The Man Who Would Be Vogue” B+

For the first 10 minutes of the pilot episode, it feels like The Assassination Of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story is going to be a different show. Based on the series’ first installment, it’s likely that after opening with a murder, the season would then continue on to the ongoing FBI investigation, the issues with the press, and the ensuing manhunt—one that was, as dubbed in the subtitle of the Maureen Orth book, “the largest failed manhunt in U.S. history.” Instead, it appears that this season is going to work backwards: Here’s the murder, and here’s what got us to that point.

What’s also clear, within those first 10 minutes, is that this season is going to be gorgeous to look at. The set of Versace’s mansion—which critics toured a bit of at last summer’s TCA press tour, and which left me breathless—is immediately memorable, painstakingly recreated to the last detail. The direction by Ryan Murphy (who should perhaps continue to focus on throwing around big ideas and directing episodes while leaving the actual screenwriting to others) is fluid and impressive, gliding as it follows Versace through his mansion, and featuring languid tilts above marble staircases.

Through both the direction and the writing, Assassination aims to set up parallels between famed designer Gianni Versace and his murderer Andrew Cunanan—reflecting what Andrew hoped were similarities, but actually depicting the reality of their differences—and for the most part, it’s successful. Versace gets his morning orange juice delivered on a platter while Andrew drinks from a cheap soda can; Versace is cool and casual as he buys magazines and exchanges pleasantries while Andrew is panicked and sweaty after vomiting in a bathroom with homophobic graffiti. Even their walks are contrasted: Versace strides on the sidewalk, looking straight ahead; Andrew trudges through the leaves, his head down.

The titular assassination comes quickly. Versace’s dead before the title card.

So, where does the episode go from here? Way back to 1990, Andrew jumping on the bed between his coupled friends, waking them up to reveal that he met Versace at a fancy gay nightclub—in the private members only section, of course. As Erik Adams put it in his pre-air review, writer Tom Rob Smith has to “fill in a lot of the blanks involving the relationships between predator and prey,” blanks that not even Maureen Orth could fill in Vulgar Favors. Did Andrew and Versace ever meet? (Versace’s family categorically denies this; Orth’s book asserts they did meet at a club before the opera’s premiere.) But the scene is mesmerizing despite the truth because it’s the first time we see Andrew’s brain at work: the persistence, the narcissism, the neverending lying, the slimy—but almost impressive—way he can sense an opening and jump in, confidently faking his way through any conversation. And Andrew is already telling his friends it happened differently.

“The Man Who Would Be Vogue” isn’t terribly subtle in setting up Andrew’s character when it comes to dialogue. The non-verbal cues, the props (the episode’s title paraphrases the title of Caroline Seebohm’s book about Condé Nast, which Andrew keeps in his backpack along with his gun), and the lingering moments (such as the camera’s slow zoom during the opera) all work better. Sometimes the dialogue is too expository (yes, sure, it’s a pilot): “You tell gay people you’re gay, and straight people you’re straight,” Andrew’s friend says to him. “Every time I feel like I’m getting close to you, you say you’re someone else.” No one really knows who Andrew is—least of all Andrew—and that’s part of what made his murders so bizarre and confusing. What we do know is what Andrew wants to be: He wants to be one of the elite, he wants to be someone everyone loves. He wants to be, in his own words, “impressive.” Through his “date” with Versace—which was surely a fantasy, no?—we gather more of what Andrew wants to hear. “You’re a creative, right?” Versace asks Andrew while pouring them champagne on the abandoned stage. “You’re handsome, clever. I’m sure you’re going to be someone really special one day.”

There’s not much time to linger on that past because the episode jumps back to 1997’s murder: Antonio hearing the shot, Andrew examining his work that includes a dead bird. While Andrew takes off running, Antonio tends to Versace’s rapidly dying body. A crowd starts to form as the police arrive; a man grabs his Polaroid to snap a photo of Versace being loaded into the ambulance. That one flash is a harbinger of what’s to come from money-hungry friends and strangers trying, often successfully, to profit off tragedy to the ways in which the media will interfere, undermine, and screw with the police’s investigation. Another forewarning is about the FBI’s ineptitude: piles of “Wanted By FBI” flyers featuring Andrew’s photos are untouched and undistributed, sitting in the trunk of Agent Evans’s car. Later, a pawn shop employee recognizes Andrew; she turned over his transaction forms (a requirement) to the police a week ago but nothing came from it. Would he have been caught earlier if people saw the flyers around and called the cops? Or if the police had read the pawn shop form—complete with a current address—a week prior and recognized his name? What Assassination might focus on, it seems, is if Versace’s murder could have been prevented.

It’s strange that in the first episode of a show titled The Assassination Of Gianni Versace, there isn’t too much to say about Versace himself, or his world. Donatella’s entrance is thrilling, and each move she makes is so deliberate, from putting on her sunglasses to fixing the marblehead that the detective turned askew. Antonio is similarly transfixing, and Ricky Martin displays impressive acting in this episode. It’s heartbreaking to watch him questioned by police who conflates “partner” with “pimp,” and who basically discounts Versace and Antonio’s relationship—partly, I assume, because it’s a homosexual relationship and partly because Antonio admits they brought other men into it. When he asks “the difference” between Antonio and the other men, Antonio replies—tearfully, exasperated, almost helplessly—“15 years!” It’s thankfully broken up by Donatella, who dismisses the detective and instructs Antonio to never speak to anyone about Versace without consulting her first. Donatella’s grieving but still knows the score: the police and the press will go through Versace’s life, “every discretion,” with a fine-tooth comb. She also knows that she has to keep Versace, the company, alive. “I will not allow that man, that nobody, to kill my brother twice.”

Welcome to weekly coverage of The Assassination Of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story, a title only a long-winded recapper could love! The O.J. installment was not only among my top shows of that year but probably the most fun I’ve had covering a show, so I jumped at the chance to dive into this one.

Did anyone else read the Maureen Orth book? Though it was certainly extensive and detailed, I was… lukewarm on it, to be honest, though mostly for spoilery (?) reasons relating to Andrew’s sexuality and sexual interests that I shouldn’t touch upon here but I’d love to know your thoughts!

It was nice to know a bit more about Versace through that “date” scene: his emphasis on family, how “maybe every dress” he makes is actually for Donatella, what he wants people to understand just by wearing his clothes.

Gianni Versace is a great follow-up to O.J. Simpson—and especially over a Hurricane Katrina season—for a number of reasons, but a big one is that the Simpson case (including the involvement of the press, how closely it was followed by normal people who were just watching television, and the failure to prosecute) were all still lingering in the minds of the FBI and local police departments when investigating these murders.

Two things I keep going back to: How long it took Antonio to wash Versace’s bloods off his hands, and Andrew explaining that his lies only matter if other people “know it isn’t true.”

‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story’ Season Premiere: Someone Really Special

A half-hour into the second season of FX’s “American Crime Story” comes a scene that is startling in its brazenness. A tourist, whose request for an autograph the designer Gianni Versace politely declined moments earlier, is gawking outside the Versace mansion. Versace has been shot to death on his own front steps, where a pool of blood remains after the body has been carried away. She dashes under the yellow police tape cordoning off the crime scene. She dips a page from a glossy magazine — could it be Vogue? — into the still-wet puddle and gingerly inserts her ghoulish souvenir into a transparent plastic pouch.

The murder of Gianni Versace outside his palatial Miami Beach home on July 15, 1997, had so many elements of a made-for-TV scandal — fashion, celebrity and psychopathy, all against the backdrop of a 1930 Mediterranean Revival villa where a room can now be had for $1,000 a night — that recounting it could easily devolve into a grotesque act itself, with the audience in the position of the memento-hoarding tourist. To its credit, “The Assassination of Gianni Versace” is related in a mostly respectful manner thus far, allowing this Verdian tragedy to unfold at a stately pace under the South Florida sun, though not in chronological sequence.

The season premiere works backward from the morning of the crime: Versace (Edgar Ramírez), having awakened in his mansion and eaten breakfast in a pink house robe, is gunned down as he returns from a stroll down the beach to buy some magazines. The killer is 27-year-old Andrew Cunanan (Darren Criss), whom we first see cradling a backpack stuffed with a handgun and a copy of Caroline Seebohm’s 1982 book “The Man Who Was Vogue: The Life and Times of Condé Nast” inside. Before steeling himself to commit murder, Cunanan takes the time to throw up in a public bathroom; we see that an anti-gay slur has been etched onto the stall.

The cliché of the homicidal (usually closeted) homosexual — driven to kill by envy, lust, self-loathing, etc. — is so common and tired that the heavy-handed bathroom-graffiti scene gave me pause: Are this serial killer’s motives sufficiently complex to sustain nine hours of television?

My concerns were allayed for now by the robust performances — Mr. Ramírez as the soft-spoken Calabrian genius, Mr. Criss (“Glee,” “American Horror Story”) as the not-so-charming sociopath — and by Tom Rob Smith’s script and Ryan Murphy’s direction, which evoke a time that feels both recent and remote.

For those who could afford it, antiretroviral therapies had granted a reprieve from the death sentence that AIDS represented, but gay men were still routinely regarded with fear, if not contempt. Basic mainstream acceptance of their lives and relationships, much less legal recognition, was a ways off. A taint hung over discussions of gay sexuality, yet the yearning for companionship, love and joy had become far more open since the worst of the AIDS crisis a decade earlier.

Perhaps the most poignant scene in the episode is when the local police are interviewing Antonio D’Amico (Ricky Martin), Versace’s partner. His white tennis shirt and shorts encrusted with his lover’s blood, a forlorn and exhausted D’Amico is asked to explain why “dancers, models and escorts” have been in and out of the house.

“I was his partner, not his pimp,” D’Amico replies. He loved Versace. They were together for 15 years. The officer is mystified.

“The other men, did they consider themselves to be Versace’s partner too?” he asks.

Whether such a lack of understanding affected Cunanan’s evolution as a killer will presumably be a dominant theme for the rest of the season, which is loosely based on the journalist Maureen Orth’s “Vulgar Favors: The Assassination of Gianni Versace.” The first suggestion that he might be lacking a moral compass comes in a flashback to 1990, when a fawning and flirtatious Cunanan approaches Versace and his entourage in a crowded nightclub in San Francisco, but later tells his friends that it was Versace who initiated the conversation.

It emerges that Cunanan — who graduated from an elite private high school in San Diego and, after dropping out of college, lived off a series of benefactors — tells so many lies that even he may have come to believe them. A Catholic and a former altar boy, he passes himself off as a Jew. Asked why he tells straight people that he’s straight, and gay people that he’s gay, he replies, “I tell people what they want to hear.”

Versace invites the young fabulist to a night at the opera: a production of Richard Strauss’s “Capriccio,” for which Versace designed the costumes. They exchange origin stories. Versace’s centers on his muse — his sister, Donatella — and love of family. Cunanan’s outlandish tale involves a wealthy father who owned a pineapple plantation in the Philippines, became a pilot for Imelda Marcos, and later ran off with a farmhand, who also served as the chauffeur of his Rolls-Royce. Got that?

If Versace is incredulous, he’s too polite to say so. He is downright avuncular as he tells Cunanan, “You’re handsome, you’re clever, I’m sure you’re going to be someone really special one day.”

That’s some understatement: Returning to 1997, we learn that Cunanan was wanted for four other murders before Versace’s. A botched nationwide manhunt, it seems, has failed to prevent a serial killer from striking again. The F.B.I. has joined the Miami Beach police as they home in on Cunanan.

Meanwhile, Donatella Versace (Penélope Cruz) flies in from Italy and asserts control over her slain brother’s business empire, which was headed for an initial public offering on the Milan and New York stock exchanges. She comes across as fiercely protective of her brother’s legacy, if a little sinister. “My brother is still alive as long as Versace is alive,” she declares, making clear that the brand has transcended the man. She later brushes aside a grieving D’Amico, telling him: “This is not a time for strangers. This is a time for family.”

The term “assassination” is, so far, an enigma. The hotels of South Beach, the nightclubs of San Francisco, the gay demimonde and the Italianate arias so lavishly depicted in this series seem fairly removed from the world of politics, particularly at a time when AIDS had begun to recede as a public health crisis and when legal recognition of same-sex relationships still seemed like a distant prospect. How will this show’s creators define politics, including the politics of the closet? What criteria will it use to deem Gianni Versace’s death an assassination? Or — as the bloodied turtle dove found next to his body suggests — was it more like a martyrdom?

‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story’ Season Premiere: Someone Really Special

‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace’ series premiere recap: Versace on the floor

We gave it an A-

Before we begin our recapping journey for The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story, let’s be explicit about a few points. The Versace family has released a statement in opposition to the television show — which is based on the book Vulgar Favors by Maureen Orth — calling it a “work of fiction.” So I’ll be recapping this as a work of fiction; the people I’ll be discussing will be characters, based on the show’s portrayal of real-life people. I’m watching this as a television show loosely based on true events, as a piece of entertainment, and not as history. Good?

Right away, Murphy is doing what he does best with AGV: We open with a sweeping baroque string score, and a shot of Gianni Versace (Édgar Ramírez) waking up in his gilded palace, sliding his feet into slippers and gliding through his ornate home to a balcony where he overlooks Miami Beach like a king.

Down below, by the water, Andrew Cunanan (Darren Criss) wears a red hat, with a backpack by his side that contains a copy of The Man Who Was Vogue, and a gun.

The tension builds: Versace takes a pill; Cunanan screams in the ocean. Versace leaves his home and someone shouts his name, but it’s only tourists who want an autograph, which he politely refuses; Cunanan vomits into a toilet; and Versace continues his glide to a newsstand to pick up copies of magazines. Already, we know the intersection of these two men feels viscerally wrong; it’s as if they live in different galaxies, or entirely different parallel universes.

But then it happens. As Versace is reentering the gates of his home, Cunanan sees his chance. Cunanan walks towards him, arm outstretched, and shoots. There’s our introduction.

The episode immediately picks back up with Cunanan jumping into a bed where two of his friends are sleeping, bragging about meeting Versace. It takes a few seconds to register that this is a flashback — we’re now in 1990, in San Francisco — and it only takes a few more seconds to realize what sort of person Cunanan is. The real work in this scene is done by actress Annaleigh Ashford, whose polite smiles and subtle head tilts fully encapsulate a friend who’s gotten just a little bit fed up with that friend who’s too much.

Cunanan claims that he met Gianni Versace last night, and his friends humor him. He describes a scenario where Versace approached him and he rebuffed him with a perfectly flirtatious retort. As the audience, we’re privy to the real scene: Cunanan found Versace in the VIP section of a nightclub and talked his way next to him, pretending they had met before, bringing up his mother’s Italian heritage. This scene works on two levels: first, establishing that Cunanan actually did meet Versace, and second, establishing Cunanan as a liar, with delusions of grandeur and a remorseless way of ignoring the truth.

Our opinion of Cunanan is confirmed when we see him in conversation with another friend who calls him out: Cunanan has lied about being Jewish, he tells his straight friends he’s straight and his gay friends he’s gay. He lies so often that even we aren’t sure whether he’s telling the truth when he claims that Versace invited him to the opera, for which Versace designed the costumes. Andrew is there, in the next scene, but it’s possible the opera is just another place he manipulated his way into without an actual invitation. Maybe he just bought his own ticket.

But no, at the end of the opera, Versace is there, not surprised to see Andrew Cunanan. Their demeanor is flirtatious, and it’s implied that their relationship might have become sexual. Obviously, there are no witnesses here, and no way to confirm whether or not that actually happened, and so the show provides plenty of plausible deniability.

Back in the present (or rather, the 1996 present), we’re treated to some of the beautiful, slightly extra symbolism that feels so exquisitely Ryan Murphy: a bloody dove, also shot; the tourist who had asked for Versace’s autograph running past the police barricade to get his blood on her magazine page (beats a signature!); the medics cutting through Versace’s medusa logo on his T-shirt in the hospital.

Cunanan freaks out for a while in his car, and then pulls out a clean shirt — this was clearly a pre-meditated murder, not just an impulsive shooting. The police know the suspect is in the parking garage, and whether it was planned or luck, they end up tracking and tackling a stranger in an identical red shirt.

From the identification information on the car, the police are able to ID the suspect as Andrew Cunanan, already wanted for the murder from which he stole the truck. We learn Cunanan has already killed four people, but the FBI had apparently done an atrocious job of trying to track him down. No posters went out with his face on them. A woman who ran a pawn shop had reported him selling something a week before the Versace shooting (using his real name, and real ID) and no one followed up. It becomes sickeningly obvious that if anyone had been paying attention, Cunanan could have been stopped before his most famous murder.

Within the walls of the Versace compound, Gianni’s sister Donatella (Penelope Cruz) arrives to establish dominion over the Versace empire. The FBI have been interrogating Versace’s longtime partner Antonio D’Amico (Ricky Martin), trying to shift the conversation to frame him as a pimp or a cheater, and not as a boyfriend. It’s true that D’Amico brought men back for Gianni to sleep with, and their Greco-Roman inspired home was the site of all types of debauchery, but D’Amico tries to make it clear that he was different from the others. They lived together for 14 years.

Donatella is obviously not a fan of D’Amico. He symbolically extends his hand to her; she rejects him. And when she walks into a board meeting to discuss the future of the brand, she closes the door behind her, leaving D’Amico in the hallway. She doesn’t see him as a member of the family, and because the brand is Versace, he’s no longer relevant, especially because, in her view, he couldn’t accomplish his single task of keeping Gianni safe.

The FBI do manage to find Cunanan’s motel room, but when they break in, smoke and guns blazing, it’s not Cunanan in the bed but a twitchy junkie named Ronnie.

And there we have it: a pilot that sets all the pieces in motion and promises many more hours of fashion, intrigue, and stylistically splattered blood.

‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace’ series premiere recap: Versace on the floor

‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story’ premiere recap: When doves die

Warning: This recap of “The Man Who Would Be Vogue” episode of The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story contains spoilers.

The best part of Peak TV is how excellent television no longer has to appeal to everyone. Sure, we can discuss giant hits like The Walking Dead with total strangers, and grandma won’t stop talking about Breaking Bad. But increasingly — and often thanks to producer Ryan Murphy — mass audiences are not what the best shows aim for. About fourteen people watched last year’s best series (Twin Peaks) and just try bringing up Insecure at a dinner party. We’re not all watching the same great shows anymore, but man, what a time to be a fringe TV viewer.

This is to say that The Assassination of Gianni Versace, the stellar new entry of Murphy’s already perfect American Crime Story series, will be most appreciated by the chicest of bubbles. It’s gaudy, terrifying, campy, tragic, heartfelt, gorgeously filmed… And probably too specific in its milieu to excite a mainstream audience. But if the past 1.3 years taught us anything, it’s that bubbles may not always win elections, but damn is our art better. Definitely comment below if you disagree jk.

“The Man Who Would Be Vogue” was one of the most spellbinding and compelling (and timely!) episodes of television I’ve ever seen, and we should talk about it!

We began with a typical morning in Miami, particularly if you are a wealthy Italian designer at the top of his game in the mid-to-late ’90s.

This, friends, was Gianni Versace (Edgar Ramirez), and between his gilded beach palace and servants in black tennis shorts we could gather that he was pretty successful. Not so successful that he didn’t eat revolting honeydew melon for breakfast, but doing well enough by most standards.

By this point Versace was so famous that obese, pale midwesterners would wait outside his home begging for him to autograph old issues of Vogue. Now THAT is fame.

A few blocks away at the beach, a young man named Andrew Cunanan (Darren Criss) was just finishing up screaming at the ocean. He had a big day ahead of him. He was ready to MURDER.

And in a wordless, artfully directed, heartbreaking sequence, Cunanan ran up and shot Versace right there on his front steps. Several times. In the face. In other words, this ended up being not that great of a morning for him. Probably a Top 5 worst morning, if we’re being honest.

We then flashed back to the first time Cunanan met Versace, at a gay dance club in San Francisco. Right off the bat (which is a baseball term and therefore probably not relevant to this scene) we learned that Cunanan’s ambitions to hang out with a famous man were outshined only by his ability to lie and exaggerate the details of his own life. Despite Versace’s initial reluctance to talk to this weirdo nobody, he was eventually intrigued by Cunanan’s claims of Italian heritage and other rich boy jazz. Cunanan was IN.

Except we then saw Cunanan replay the evening’s events to the skeptical straight couple he’d been living with, omitting certain details like how it’d been in a gay club (Cunanan was posing as straight to his roommates) and making it sound like Versace was picking HIM up. But I loved when the roommate dude looked at his wife and they rolled their eyes knowingly. Cunanan clearly loved to spin fanciful yarns, but it was also clear his friends were no longer believing his wild tales.

Like his college friend over here, who called him out for lying to everybody about not only his sexuality but also his ethnicity and social class. Except what he SHOULD have called Cunanan out for was his glasses that only attached to the bridge of his nose. What kind of Bond villain was Andrew Cunanan trying to dress as? Anyway, regardless of all this, he was verifiably invited to the opera that Versace had designed gowns for, and that meant he needed to HUSTLE if he wanted Versace to believe that he was knowledgable and worldly.

I am honestly not sure what those papery rectangle stacks are, but they appear to have ‘words’ on them and in this case Andrew Cunanan was reading them? I don’t know, ask an old person. (I’m 57.)

But yeah, Versace seemed to be the only person in the world NOT skeptical of this young, handsome liar. After the opera, as Cunanan literally basked in the spotlight while on stage, he told tales of growing up on Indonesian plantations and a Bentley-driving gay father. Perhaps Versace could tell this dude was making things up, but he seemed intrigued by the improv. Cheers to con artistry!

One of the less-reported details of Versace’s murder was the fact that he wasn’t the only victim. Well, there had been at least four other victims before this, but there was another victim in this incident. That white dove! A white dove was murdered right alongside Gianni Versace and that is the only thing that made this tragedy even sadder. Well, also the fact that Versace’s shoes fell off.

And then, in detail more graphic than any of us asked for, we watched as paramedics and doctors attempted to save a bullet-riddled Versace’s life. [Spoiler] They did not.

The sequences detailing the aftermath were visually clever and wrenching, from watching the surgeons peel off their gloves and exit the room, leaving Versace’s body alone… To the autograph seekers who literally sopped up blood from his front steps in order to create a souvenir to sell. But my very favorite was the woman who arrived at the scene in full couture and began to WERK behind the news lady.

Say what you will about her lack of propriety, but that lady had star quality.

For his part Andrew Cunanan seemed downright giddy with what he’d done, stalking through town spying on TVs and smiling at newspaper headlines. These were not the reactions of a remorseful, sympathetic person and you can quote me on that.

Then somehow the episode got even BETTER? Because this was when Donatella Versace (Penelope Cruz) showed up to mourn, accuse, and succeed her brother in his business dealings, all with a barely understandable Italian accent. Seriously, Penelope Cruz is truly next-level. Hope she likes Emmys.

Speaking of incredible: Did you guys know Ricky Martin can ACT? As Versace’s live-in boyfriend of 15 years, he sobbed and projected misery like a seasoned Shakespearean actor. Adding to this particular scene’s pathos, we were brutally reminded that in 1997 people were still not comfortable with (or even cognizant of) the existence of gay relationships.

Even though the detectives were looking to investigate a murder, they seemed straight-up flummoxed by the fact that Versace had had male lovers. Worse, Donatella Versace decided that she didn’t want these details in the press, clearly believing that her brother’s homosexuality was a danger to their brand.

Actually, even way, way worse, was the fact that Andrew Cunanan was already a known suspect in other murders, but the police had plainly not done much about it, in part due to his and the victims’ homosexuality. Yep, that was a thing back then. Crimes against gays were frequently back-burnered or ignored altogether. In this scene, a pawn shop owner (played by the majestic Cathy Moriarty) saw Cunanan’s face on TV and then angrily alerted cops the fact that she’d reported him days earlier as having sold something in her shop. Yet the cops did nothing! Ugh, the ’90s were really horrible in certain/most ways.

But enough wallowing the brutal realities of an unjust world, let’s talk more about Donatella! While obviously in mourning from the still-fresh murder, this episode made very clear that her business sense trumped all. Because Versace the company had been on the verge of going public, she now feared that power over the company would be taken from the family, so she and her other brother decided to keep it private. In my opinion this made for a good move, seeing as Versace is still sort of a thing these days. (Side note, I am not sure whether this miniseries will be re-enacting Donatella’s Ice Bucket Challenge video, but here’s hoping there’s at least one episode devoted to it.)

This episode was also full of tons of extremely good and witty visuals and that’s all credit to Ryan Murphy’s directorial eye. There were a lot of clever and downright beautiful details in this episode, but I loved elderly orange speedo man watching calmly as the Miami SWAT Team descended upon Andrew Cunanan’s hotel room. What was going through his mind? What was he thinking about all this? Hopefully we’ll find out in the next episode.

At the end of this episode Andrew Cunanan remained at large. A particularly filthy looking Max Greenfield was found holing up in Cunanan’s room, so something tells me we’ll learn more about this guy. Cunanan himself had taken to roaming around Miami in canary yellow Polo shirt and matching hat, while grinning proudly at himself on the front pages of the local papers. It may have been a violent, inglorious, shameful way to achieve it, but this charlatan had really reached the next level.

“The Man Who Would Be Vogue” was quite simply one of the best first-episodes of a show I’ve seen in a while. Relying on sweeping visuals over dialogue, and allowing gaudiness to exist beside sincerity, it gripped me right away. While we know this is not a happy story and it doesn’t end particularly well, it does feel as important and timely as ever, much like its predecessor The People v. O.J. Simpson. It remains to be seen whether this season will catch on with viewers and critics like that one did, but either way it’s hard not to be grateful for something this special.

‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story’ premiere recap: When doves die