The Assassination of Gianni Versace episode 7 review – Dead Good

When you’re telling a story in long form, you need to pace yourself. With any drama there’s always a beginning, a middle and an end. It’s the classic three-act structure. If your story is a work of fiction, you can add spice and intrigue and, well, whatever you want. You need to keep the audience rapt until the dramatic final scene. If your story is based on reality, though? Well, you need to be smart with how you tell it. Especially if that story is really just ‘a very famous man got shot’.

American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace is, as we know by now, told backwards. But consider how it would have played out were they to have relayed the story in a more traditional way, in chronological order. The final instalment, episode 9, would feature the shooting. Requiring some 400 minutes of build-up to the main event, and with Andrew Cunanan’s murders being bunched together in a spree, the audience would have to wait some five episodes to see their first murder. That’s some leap of faith that’s required.

So, sensibly, The Assassination of Gianni Versace opted for a reverse narrative style that allowed us to get the money ‘shot’ nice and early. The only downside to toploading a nine-episode run? There’s a very real chance that things will start to tail off a little towards the end. And, for the first time here in episode 7, ‘Ascent’, that’s exactly what we’re faced with.

In one way this lack of any real story is quite useful. We see Cunanan helpless and pathetic and understand his ‘social climbing at any cost’ mentality and where it comes from. But for a show that’s brought us murder, plotting, style, tension and real verve, this week’s was – dare we say it – just a wee bit dull.

Even the episode’s highlights lack any real punch. Sure, we see how Andrew seduced David in San Francisco and how he came to meet Norman. But we already know the details from earlier weeks. That said, there is some solace to be taken from occasional details. David’s childhood tale of a promise made to a bullied friend was touching. And when Andrew steals the memory for his own purposes later on, repurposing it for personal gain, he sullies such a sweet thing in a way that only a truly damaged sociopath can.

Again, we have to applaud Darren Criss’ performance here. At once he makes Cunanan a dead-eyed narcissist and a vulnerable kid. A spoiled brat at home with his mother and a charming socialite while out for an evening at the theatre in the company of older gentlemen.

For a few weeks now we’ve complained that The Assassination of Gianni Versace was lacking the ‘Gianni Versace’ part. This week we were treated to a healthy dose of the man – although ‘healthy’ may be the wrong word, given that we see the fashion designer struggling with what seems to be HIV, something Versace’s family have always disputed. He debuts a daring new dress with his sister Donatella as his model, as part of a symbolic ‘handover of the business’, it seems.

As touching as this should be, it just lacks any real drama. Again, there is one sweet moment, when the two sit down to design a dress together. But the lack of scope in the episode and the rather ropey set design left us cold.

There are two episodes left. We’re still yet to really see what Andrew Cunanan’s motive was for killing Versace, if there even was one. Plus, of course, we still – when we go back to the future – have the manhunt. Here’s hoping episodes 8 and 9 pick up and this was just a minor blip to an otherwise gripping crime drama.

Our hunch? This was a six-part series stretched a little too far.

The Assassination of Gianni Versace episode 6 review – Dead Good

We’ve been extremely impressed by this second series of American Crime Story so far. The Assassination of Gianni Versace has gifted us a fascinating look into the life of the man responsible for the death of the famous fashion designer. It’s also given us some rather thought-provoking subtexts centring around gay life and some of the many issues faced by the LGBT community, especially back in the 1990s. But one thing that’s been lacking up until now is an explanation as to motive… Why?

Why did Andrew Cunanan shoot Versace dead? Why did he kill Lee Miglin? Why murder David Madson and Jeff Trail? Why kill truck owner William Reese when he seemingly didn’t need to?

Telling its story backwards means we’ve now seen Cunanan’s crimes in all their gore and cold-blooded horror. We’ve seen him plotting, scheming, lying, stealing and killing. But without background or motivation, all we’re looking at is an American psycho. A gay Patrick Bateman. This week, however, that all changed. Now we kind of know at least some of those all-important whys.

This sixth episode of nine opens in La Jolla, a rich part of San Diego. An extravagantly opulent – and extremely nineties – house is hosting Andrew’s birthday. Judging by the free-flowing Champagne and calibre of guests, you’d have to surmise that Andrew was, at this point, doing rather well for himself. But it soon becomes apparent that he’s effectively a hired live-in lover to his rich older ‘partner’ (or client), a handsome businessman in his sixties called Norman Blachford.

Soon, we learn that David, Andrew’s second victim, is coming over and that Andrew is in love with him. By the end of the evening, it’s clear to our sociopath lead character (played by Darren Criss, who seriously just gets better and better by the week) that David may need some convincing. A flash vacation in Los Angeles is hastily arranged. It ends badly and David makes his position clear. The feelings are not mutual.

Enraged but defiant, Andrew presents Norman with a new and long list of demands. Including becoming the sole heir to the fortune of his older ‘lover’. Norman rejects the idea and Andrew storms off after smashing a chair through a glass table in a chillingly violent hint of what he’s later to be capable of.

The resentment bubbles up. Cunanan hates having to service older men like Norman and Lee who he doesn’t love just for the status and money he thinks is owed him. He hates loving younger men who don’t return his love, like David. The hate builds up and up until he’s ready to explode. His motivations are becoming clear.

This sixth part of The Assassination of Gianni Versace introduces two other possible whys into the enigma of our killer… Drugs and Mama. When things are going Andrew’s way, he celebrates with cocaine. When they’re not, he turns to crystal meth. When things are spiralling out of control, he turns to his delusional, mentally unstable and borderline unhinged mother. None of these things, as you can imagine, help straighten him out much.

One why we are still left to ponder is why Gianni Versace? The only hint we got this week was in a meth fantasy/dream sequence in which Andrew laments to his tailor, a certain Italian man with wavy blonde hair, about his luck…

“What could be more generous than spending everything on other people and being left with nothing? What could be more generous than finding soul mates for other people and then ending up alone?”

“People have taken from me, and taken from me, and taken and taken from me. Now I’m spent. And they say this man has nothing left to give. And a man with nothing to give is a nothing man.”

“This world has wasted me. It has wasted me while it has turned you, Mr Versace, into a star.”

Could it just be that? Delusions of grandeur, resentment and jealousy? We guess we’ll find out exactly why over the course of the next three weeks.

The Assassination of Gianni Versace episode 6 review – Dead Good

The Assassination of Gianni Versace episode 5 review – Dead Good

Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.

That was the official name of Bill Clinton’s 1993 policy on how to treat gay people in the US military. While technically outlawing discrimination, the ruling barred anyone in the forces from being openly gay, lesbian or bisexual. Why? Well, because ‘demonstrating a propensity or intent to engage in homosexual acts creates an unacceptable risk to the high standards of morale, good order and discipline, and unit cohesion that are the essence of military capability.’ Apparently.

That policy, supported by only 23% of American citizens at the time it was introduced, was only formerly scrapped in 2011. Just seven years ago.

“Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” also happens to be the title of this week’s episode of American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace. And with good reason. The main focus of this fifth episode of ACS series 2 is ostensibly homosexuality in the military. Seem a little strange for a crime drama about the murder of a fashion designer? Well, perhaps. But as we’ve already seen, this is no ordinary crime drama.

The Assassination of Gianni Versace isn’t a police procedural, or even a full examination into the twisted mind of the man who shot Gianni Versace. It’s a show about very real issues. One that, thankfully, can deal with them seriously, sensitively and with the lightest of touches. In the wrong hands, an hour about the difficulties of coming out could seem heavy handed. Gladly, that’s not a problem here.

The focus this week is the juxtaposition between two very different men experiencing the same dilemma. But where we see how difficult Andrew Cunanan’s first victim Jeff Trails finds coming out while serving in the US Navy (and how the process effectively ruins his career), it’s a different story for Signori Versace. Despite his concerns, when he publicly outs himself to Advocate magazine during an interview in Milan, his bravery is celebrated and his career is buoyed.

It seems as though class, wealth, fame and the ability to make fabulous clothes affords you certain privileges when it comes to how people view you.

It’s good to see Édgar Ramírez, Ricky Martin and Penélope Cruz back this week after a couple of episodes away – if for no other reason than Versace’s outrageous collection of rainbow-coloured silk shirts. While it was only a fleeting scene, seeing Versace inviting his long-term partner Antonio onto the sofa to be interviewed alongside him arguably offered the episode’s most touching moment.

Over in Minneapolis, we see Andrew’s arrival and get the background as to just why Jeff and David were so weary of him. Both know his propensity to lie, cheat and steal yet neither know his willingness to pick up a hammer or gun in anger quite yet. The fact that we know what’s coming makes the tone all the more eerie and Cunanan’s behaviour somehow even more reprehensible.

Weirdly, this pre-murder spree Andrew is actually quite a bit more unsettling and jarring than the one we’ve grown used to these past four or so weeks. But, for the first time, we see his charming and charismatic side – the side that made Jeff take to him in the first time. Walking into his first gay bar in San Diego, sailor Jeff quickly changes his mind about being in there and turns to leave, until Andrew introduces himself and, in a weirdly sweet moment, sets about buying him a few drinks and befriending him.

As in episode 3 and episode 4, the main cast is great, but it’s a supporting actor that steals the show. In this fifth episode it’s Finn Wittrock as Jeff. We saw him briefly last week getting his skull caved in, but here we really see a torn and desperate young man. The near-attempted suicide scene is genuinely heartbreaking.

As touching, dramatic and worthy as this week’s instalment of American Crime Story was, unfortunately it did exercise its creative licence quite a lot. Trail’s departure from the Navy wasn’t the way the show outlines here and there’s no record of the vicious attack Trail stopped or the wince-inducing tattoo self-removal incident. We’ve no issue with a little story massaging for dramatic purposes, but this tale hardly seems to need it. The facts are outrageous enough.

We’re now more than halfway through this truly excellent series. We’re seeing Andrew’s personality and motives finally being fleshed out. But will next week’s instalment finally go into just what it is that made him so preoccupied with Gianni Versace…?

Well, as Bill once said – don’t ask, don’t tell.

The Assassination of Gianni Versace episode 5 review – Dead Good

The Assassination of Gianni Versace episode 4 review – Dead Good

The runaway success of the maiden run of American Crime Story, The People Vs. O J Simpson, dealt with a multi-faceted crime that had everything a drama series could ever want: murder, deception, media sensationalism and a long-running court case, complete with a highly controversial verdict. It even had an extremely Hollywood live-action car chase ferchrissakes.

Such was the reception to series 1 that fans were hyped to find out which famous true crime would inspire its follow-up. And while there was little in the way of explicit criticism, plenty of murmurs before The Assassination of Gianni Versace began airing suggested that this ‘fan shoots fashion designer’ story wasn’t really enough to justify and hold its entire 450-minute running time. Thankfully, those murmurs have been proven quite wrong.

The main reason this story is more than capable of supporting a nine-part series is that Versace’s killer, Andrew Cunanan, has a story which is much deeper, darker and more grotesquely fascinating than many people realised, with most people, in fact, barely knowing who he was before this series. Another large factor is that each of his crimes is treated with time, patience and pretty much a full episode each. It’s as though each week is a separate play exploring one of the strings of the man’s diabolical murders, with Darren Criss’s Cunahan in the lead and one of his tragic victims in the supporting role.

We’re sure Signori Versace’s story will pick back up next week or the week after, but this first half of American Crime Story series 2 should really, by rights, be called ‘The Assassin of Gianni Versace’ instead, such is the emphasis so far on the gunman and his rampage.

This fourth episode, again, is stolen by the actors playing Cunahan’s victims. We’re sure Edgar Ramirez will have his chance later in the series, but last week we had the Miglins adding real pathos and emotion to events. And this week it’s his second victim, David Madson, who propels the episode – and the man playing him, newcomer Cody Fern, does truly a sterling job bringing him alive (albeit all too briefly).

Only slightly out of the closet, Madson is a young guy, an up-and-coming Minneapolis architect (what is it about that profession? Cunanan’s third victim Lee Miglin was also an architect…). He and Cunanan are former lovers and take to the road – to Cunanan’s mind – like Bonnie and Clyde, after Andrew smashes in the head of their mutual friend Jeff Trail. But, in reality, he basically kidnaps David and forces him to flee with him.

As with last week, there’s a further exploration into the idea of how shame and embarrassment work for gay people, this time via flashbacks to David’s childhood relationship with his father and how he came out to him – his main concern throughout their bizarre post-hammer time road trip being that his parents would be shamed by their homosexual son and his connection to a brutal ‘gay crime’.

While these fascinating and touching dives into the victims’ lives are welcome and provide excellent drama, they are a real juxtaposition with our spree killer Andrew Cunanan. He’s been at the crux of everything so far and will, presumably, continue to be. And yet still we know almost nothing about him and his true motives – although that is almost certain to change soon, we’re sure.

We’ve seen all of the victims come and go now, so the ‘what?’ and ‘who?’ parts of this season’s American Crime Story are out of the way. We’re really just left with the ‘why?’ – and with just over half the run left, we’re hopeful we’ll find out some of those answers…

The Assassination of Gianni Versace episode 4 review – Dead Good

The Assassination of Gianni Versace episode 3 review – Dead Good

“What terrifies you more?” Andrew Cunanan asks a ‘friend’ of his midway through this week’s American Crime Story. “Death or being disgraced?” Disgrace? Disgrace isn’t so bad. You get used to it…”

And Cunahan should know. Everything he does is disgraceful. In fact, just moments after asking Chicago property tycoon Lee Miglin that question, he drops a block of concrete on his head and stabs the bound and gagged man repeatedly with a screwdriver.

This whole second series of ACS is all about disgrace and shame. The first run of the crime anthology – The People Vs. O J Simpson – was all about echoing current concerns over race using a famous murder from modern history. And this follow-up also reflects topical issues, this time the societal and psychological difficulties faced by many LGBT people – an issue close to the heart of the show’s creator, Ryan Murphy.

In episode 3 we see two very different gay men, both dipped in disgrace and shame, but for very different reasons. Lee Miglin is a successful Chicago businessman and closeted homosexual who’s spent his entire adult life suppressing his sexuality, wracked by shame and in fear of having his secret exposed and being publicly ‘disgraced’. His secret was to emerge, but only after the 72-year-old became Andrew Cunanan’s third victim.

Cunanan himself is less concerned with covering up his homosexuality. And even less concerned with covering up his murders. The real shame and disgrace here are reserved for him. And rightly so. He is, after all, a pathological liar who tortures and kills people he knows, has been in relationships with and even greatly admires.

But is it admiration…? Miglin was planning on building the world’s tallest structure. Gianni Versace was the world’s most famous fashion designer. Cunanan was drawn to – and killed – both. Perhaps his motivation was more unbridled and untamed jealousy more than adulation.

We saw both his third and fourth victim this week. Miglin’s murder, with its elements of sexual sadism, was hideous and dangerously close to being gratuitous. But there was something somehow even more shocking in the dead-eyed way Cunanan later rather unnecessarily puts a bullet through the head of a man begging for his life, just so he could steal his truck. Darren Criss has a chillingly bored look on his face as he coldy dispatches the man. It’s so cold in fact that the brief scene leaves you with chills.

This instalment of The Assassination of Gianni Versace, ‘A Random Killing’, is the first not to feature the eponymous Italian. And while that may seem a little odd for a show about him, it’s really not an issue. There are 9 episodes in total, so there’s still plenty of time to dive back into Versace’s pool and swim around. And no doubt we’ll all be back in some nice tight Speedos again next week.

In fact, it’s almost quite nice to get away from the searing heat of Miami Beach and spend the fifty minutes up in chilly Chicago. While, of course, this episode still heavily features the crazed spree killer that dominates the series, it’s really about the marriage of Lee Miglin and his loving but ultimately rejected wife, Marilyn. While their union may technically be a sham, the fact is never acknowledged formally and the thin veneer of deniability is played with such poised delicacy by Mike Farrell and Judith Light here that it’s genuinely touching and often quite heartbreaking. Their love isn’t a romantic one, but it’s strong enough and respectful enough to almost have made it all worthwhile. Almost.

When Lee’s body is discovered bound, gagged and surrounded by gay porno magazines, an unfazed Marilyn demands the police treat and report the case as a break-in gone wrong. A ‘random killing’. She doesn’t want Lee’s shame revealed. And she doesn’t want her sham revealed, either. Light’s performance here is fantastically subtle. But Farrell steals the show as the sweet and tragic figure of Miglin.

It’s just a bit of a shame we won’t be seeing either of them again.

The Assassination of Gianni Versace episode 3 review – Dead Good

TV review: The Assassination of Gianni Versace; The Secret Life of the Zoo

The Assassination of Gianni Versace
BBC Two
★★★★☆

The title The Assassination of Gianni Versace has turned out to be something of a misnomer. It isn’t about Versace’s killing, it is about his killer. Versace is a bit character fussing over dog-collar dresses (and, lest we forget, that safety-pin frock that introduced us to Liz Hurley’s breasts). As a portrait of a fantasist serial murderer it has been mesmerically done, mostly thanks to Darren Criss. His portrayal of Andrew Cunanan, who killed five people before putting a bullet through his head, has been consistently outstanding.

However, recently the show has become flabby. Like many dramas, it has suffered mid-series spread, using more filler than a meal-deal supermarket sandwich (part seven last week being a case in point). Last night’s penultimate episode also went round the houses, but in showing us Cunanan’s childhood and his abusive weirdo father who hero-worshipped his youngest son and kissed his feet when he got into the “right” school it at least brought us closer to the nub: what made Cunanan a monster. It’s a cautionary tale for anyone who repeatedly tells their child that they are “special”.

These were helpful retrospectives, with Cunanan’s broker father being caught for fraud and bolting to his native Philippines, leaving his family homeless and penniless, then telling his son to be a man for once and stab him. The timeline has been messed with far too much, but here, at last, we saw the making of the narcissist as Andrew, aged 11, was given the master bedroom while his older, unfavoured siblings shared. “If you’re a lie, then I’m a lie,” the young Cunanan told his fugitive father. And a lie is what his entire life went on to be, with him hiring himself out to men for sex under pseudonyms while pretending Daddy was a high-flyer.

Running in parallel was a mini version of Versace’s childhood in Italy, with his mother supporting his dream of being a dress designer even as his teacher called him a pervert. The stage is fully set now for the finale and although I’m very queasy about TV shows immortalising serial killers, thereby giving them what they always craved — notoriety — I think our patience will be rewarded. It’s just a shame it’s been about three episodes too long.

TV review: The Assassination of Gianni Versace; The Secret Life of the Zoo

The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story, episode 8, review – a killer resolution is all this series needs

★★★☆☆

It all comes down to the sins of the father. That’s what the penultimate episode of The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story (BBC Two) seemed to suggest regarding Versace’s killer, Andrew Cunanan.

The series started with Cunanan (Darren Criss) gunning down the designer on the steps of his Miami mansion in 1997. Over eight stately but gruesome episodes we tracked back through Cunanan’s life (and to a lesser extent Versace’s) and the string of earlier murders he committed. To the point where, this week, we finally arrived at the origin story.

We met Gianni (as a boy in 1957, encouraged by his dressmaker mother to be a designer even if that meant being called “pervert” by his teacher and “pansy” by his six-year-old classmates. (The dialogue had all the subtlety of one of Cunanan’s speciality hammer blows to the head.) But attention soon turned back to the killer and how he, too, had been an intelligent child with an effeminate streak; the spoilt favourite not of a saintly Italian mamma but of an obsessive Filipino immigrant father – Modesto “Pete” Cunanan (Jon Jon Briones) – who made the mistake of believing he could make it in America and got pulped.

As critiques of the American dream go, Modesto’s story – for all its flag worship and materialism – was not the most convincing. Because this particular member of the huddled masses was also a wife-beating delusional fraudster who robbed grannies of their life savings to send Andrew to a top-flight school. And who may, as one scene suggested briefly before fading to black, have sexually abused him.

In the climactic scene Andrew confronted Modesto, who had fled to Manilla to evade the FBI, only to be spat on and humiliated for being a “sissy” by the father who’d always purported to adore him. Well, it’s no wonder Andrew became a serial killer, appeared to be suggestion. But, as we know, plenty of people have been through a lot worse than that and avoided taking up killing as a hobby.

With just one more episode to go there’s still no knowing whether this American Crime Story will yet pull a dramatically satisfying resolution out of the bag. Let’s hope it won’t leave us feeling all we’ve done is spend too many hours in the company of a vicious multiple-murderer whose motives will never be fully pinned down.

The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story, episode 8, review – a killer resolution is all this series needs

American Crime Story: Versace has a dark problem

A sweaty Darren Criss in nothing but white y-fronts jigging around a millennial-pink motel room to Phil Collins’ ‘Easy Lover’: it’s a cheery prospect, pretty much designed for re-posts on Tumblr.

Yet Criss’s manic energy is the product of his American Crime Story character, Andrew Cunanan, torturing an older man.

With every languid hop Cunanan takes, his victim drifts closer to death. There’s not been such a sadistic visual set to a lurid 1980s banger since Christian Bale went to town on Jared Leto with an axe to a soundtrack of Huey Lewis and the News in 1999’s American Psycho.

Whether the pink motel room encounter, in episode two of The Assassination of Gianni Versace, actually happened has been questioned in plenty of fact-checking blogs. The Versace family, who branded the miniseries “a work of fiction” and criticised its basis in Maureen Orth’s book Vulgar Favours, must be pleased such blogs exist. But there is a bigger problem.

Though the title character, played by Edgar Ramirez, is portrayed as a sweet, loyal and hard-working man, the series follows the serial killer far more closely than the person whose name the series trades off.

Cunanan is the show’s most exciting character. Casting-wise, it’s a double win – Criss’s Filipino-Caucasian heritage matches Cunanan’s, and in the role he charms and frightens in equal measure.

That charm isn’t played up for telly: Cunanan was known to many as a slick operator who decorated his humdrum background with lies, pretended to be anyone but himself and, as an avid social climber, meticulously researched his suitors/victims so he knew exactly how to win them over.

His chutzpah isn’t only endearing to the characters he encounters as the series unfolds chronologically backwards, though: to the viewer, there’s something enviably daring about Cunanan lying his way into a life of luxury. When he does break for a second to tell the truth, admitting to a random guy in a noisy club that he’s a “serial killer”, it neatly mirrors American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman hiding in plain sight as he tells a woman in a noisy VIP room that he works “in murders and executions”.

After so many lies, that boldness, that “Come and get me if you think you’re hard enough” tone is refreshing. But any viewer unimpressed by that – coming off the back of four murders – might still be won over by the series’ depiction of Cunanan’s naivety and fragility.

When we discover his annoying mum and the struggles he had growing up in relative poverty, it’s – though we hate to say it – easy to sympathise with Cunanan. He simply wants the good life sold to him by the glossy Versace-adorned magazines he sneakily reads instead of doing his deadbeat retail job. But is it acceptable to invite us to sympathise with a monster?

It’s true we see the domestic abuse Cunanan meted out against his own mother (important, because it both happened in real life and is a sad and often silent forebear of many real-life mass-killings). But the camera lingers on his tears, not hers, and because the incident arrives far too late in the series it’s simply not as shocking as it should be.

On a point of indisputable artistic licence, The Assassination of Gianni Versace shows Cunanan as far more beautiful than he actually was. Cunanan wasn’t ugly and certainly used his beauty to disarm, but Criss is prettier, and harder-bodied. Even when he’s meant to be on crack he looks gorgeous.

Though the clothes Cunanan wears were considered uncool even just a few years ago, the cyclical nature of fashion – this is a series apparently about a fashion designer, after all – means that his thin-wire frame glasses, high-waisted jeans, tucked-in polo shirts, high socks, practical white sneakers and even the aforementioned Y-fronts, are pretty on-trend in 2018.

But condemning the show for glamorising a killer is perhaps simplistic.

Putting Cunanan front and centre might actually have a positive impact beyond salacious titillation, reminding the audience that this story is about so much more than Versace himself. Audiences were drawn in by the promise of Penelope Cruz as Donatella Versace and Ricky Martin as Gianni’s lover Antonio D’Amico, after all, not the impending layers of analysis of what it meant to be a gay man in post-AIDS America.

Though we get peeks into Versace’s life, they’re smartly tethered to the other characters. We see how coming out in fashion isn’t unlike coming out in the military. We see Donatella, encouraged by her brother to dress up in bondage-like leather and chains to sell herself, figuratively, to the fashion world, while Cunanan begins selling himself, literally, to older men.

By following Cunanan’s story, we get to see the lives of all his victims, who were destroyed not only by him, but by the homophobia festering within the police, government and American society at large. The story, as the producers have framed it, is as much about the ridiculous social framework that Cunanan was allowed to operate within, as it is the ridiculousness of Cunanan himself.

Darren Criss told Digital Spy exclusively: “It’s pretty clear cut on the moral spectrum where we stand, so I don’t think it glamourises [him]. If anything, it just begs the question of, ‘How do we get here? How does this happen?’ I don’t think it’s glamourising so much as investigating. You know how the story goes, but it’s the why and the how that makes us rethink what we see in front of us.”

So it’s for the best The Assassination of Gianni Versace took artistic licence with the image of the man who killed a bunch of people – rather than the man whose most outlandish move was to shock and awe the world of fashion with his beautiful designs.

With each episode, we are drawn more under Cunanan’s spell, courtesy of Criss’s stellar performance. That, the show is telling us, is why Versace died in the first place: because Cunanan managed to charm – and harm – so many others before him. What it’s also telling us – under the radar – is how he got away with it for so long.

American Crime Story: Versace has a dark problem

Wednesday’s Best TV: Chef’s Table and American Crime Story

The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story – BBC2, 9pm

Tom Rob Smith’s re-imagining of the life story of Versace’s killer Andrew Cunanan (Darren Criss) has now reversed back into his childhood.

This penultimate episode draws parallels with Death of a Salesman and even Apocalypse Now in its bid to find a rationale for Cunanan’s life of violence. It doesn’t quite succeed, as it’s hard to imagine what childhood humiliations might excuse the killer’s actions. It’s best viewed as an essay on the darker side of the American Dream.

So, while Versace’s desire to become a fashion designer is encouraged by his mother, Cunanan’s father Modesto (Jon Jon Briones) is a violent liar, a Filipino immigrant to the US who — for a while at least — manages to con his way to wealth.

Wednesday’s Best TV: Chef’s Table and American Crime Story

We need to talk about Darren Criss’s killer performance in The Assassination of Gianni Versace

There’s a bravura moment in The Assassination of Gianni Versace – American Crime Story when murderer Andrew Cunanan, resplendent in a red PVC jumpsuit, dances wildly on his own in front of a group of bemused partygoers.

It’s not quite up there with Cunanan dancing in only a tiny pair of orange pants to Philip Bailey and Phil Collins’s Easy Lover as one of his pick-ups, a closeted gay elderly gentlemen, writhes in terror, his face a mask of gaffer tape. But it’s close.

If you haven’t seen The Assassination of Gianni Versace yet, then please, run directly to iPlayer with your arms outstretched and feast on any episodes that remain there. It’s brilliantly written by British screenwriter Tom Rob Smith (who also wrote one of my all-time favourites, BBC2’s London Spy, in 2015) and has an astounding central performance from Darren Criss as Cunanan.

I’d never heard of Criss (he was in Glee, which passed me by) but as Cunanan, he delivers the performance of a lifetime. (Cunanan murdered fashion designer Gianni Versace in July 1997, the culmination of a serial killing spree that left five men dead. Cunanan later killed himself as police closed in.)

What Rob Smith and Criss have done is make a whole person, someone who exists outside of those few bare details. Versace hardly appears in the series, which belongs almost entirely to Cunanan/Criss, as we witness a damaged life spin slowly, then quickly, then completely, out of control.

Cunanan seems at first the quietest of whirlwinds, a handsome boy who drips with charm and affability. But – and this is what Criss and Rob Smith are so good at conveying – there’s something a bit off, something not quite right you can’t put your finger on. Like a photo that’s a little out of focus. And then the killing starts. Brutal, swift, out of nowhere. Yet you’ve been expecting it all along, and not just because this is an infamous story. It’s because Criss’s Cunanan trembles with murderous fury, even when he smiles. Particularly when he smiles.

Rob Smith, who is so adept at digging into the dark mud of broken lives, cleverly throws out any accepted version of narrative to play around with the timeline, and with Cunanan’s descent.

So it’s only in this week’s eighth, penultimate, episode that we learn of his twisted childhood as the “special” son of a narcissistic, fraudulent, abusive liar of a father and a fragile, emotionally vulnerable mother.

Criss’s Cunanan is terrifying. Good-looking, personable, but you don’t want him around. There was a point in one episode, when he rang the doorbell of the man who would become his next victim, when I shouted, “Don’t answer the door, don’t let him in!”

Despite all of those very generous outward charms, you know straightaway why people around him find him unsettling to be with and uncomfortable to know. He’s obsessive and forces his way into “friendships” with unwilling men who just wish he’d go away. Or he preys on older gay men who’ve never been able to come out.

Of course, none of this is easy to watch, which is just as it should be. Cunanan’s story was inescapably one of obsession and violence. But as a cautionary tale about someone who wants above all else to be famous, it’s very, horribly, modern.

We need to talk about Darren Criss’s killer performance in The Assassination of Gianni Versace