Review: The Assassination of Gianni Versace Is a ‘Juicy Saga’ That Explores Celebrity Obsession

On July 15, 1997, one of the 20th century’s most perversely awful convergences of fate occurred in Miami’s South Beach: Standing outside his mansion, superstar designer Gianni Versace was shot to death by Andrew Cunanan, a young man who’d recently achieved his own ghastly celebrity as a serial killer on the lam.

Titled The Assassination of Gianni Versace, it’s a fitting subject for season 2 of Ryan Murphy’s American Crime Story. The show’s first season, The People v. O.J. Simpson, elevated rubbernecking to an art. This, too, is a juicy saga, both outrageous and tragic: Cunanan’s murderous, three-month spree was senseless, sensational and scary — he all but rampaged across the headlines — and his suicide as authorities closed in left fundamental questions about his motives and his psychology unresolved.

This Crime Story’s power and significance, though, arise less from violent suspense (which it has) than its nuanced sensitivity to the fact that the murderer and most of his victims, Versace (Édgar Ramírez) included, were gay. Assassination operates like an enormous tuning fork that vibrates in response to the waves of tension that undermined gay existence across America in the 1990s.

Does the show go so far as to suggest that Cunanan, like Matt Damon in the 1999 movie The Talented Mr. Ripley, became a cold-blooded killer because of homophobia? Well, no. But this was still an era in which the acceptance of gay identity, internally and outwardly, was a fraught, paranoid business.

The closet was not an incubator of good mental health.

However, let’s return to the more exciting topic of violent suspense.

Assassination, based on Maureen Orth’s Vulgar Favors, oscillates between the luxe and the gory, but its nine episodes (eight of which were made available for preview) naturally focus more on Cunanan (Glee’s Darren Criss). If Cunanan were somehow able to be resurrected today, he might very well post his murders on Instagram under the insane notion that he was some kind of influencer — he was obsessed with celebrity media, and seems to have wall-papered his demented mind with images of fashion magazines, Rodeo Drive brands and A-list celebrities.

But romantic delusion (and disillusionment) may have been what triggered his killings: When the man Cunanan considered love of his life, architect David Madson (Cody Fern), didn’t reciprocate his feelings, he fixated on a mutual friend, Jeffrey Trail (Finn Wittrock), a former Navy lieutenant, as his rival and obstacle. Both Madson and Trail ended up dead, the first by gunshot and the second by claw hammer.

Assassination slowly works backward from the Versace murder, Cunanan’s fifth and final killing. Episode 8 even stretches all the way back to Cunanan and Versace’s boyhoods in Italy and on the West Coast, respectively. We have little Gianni, whose dressmaker mother respects and encourages his designing talent, and little Andrew, whose Filipino father, a fraudulent stockbroker, spoonfeeds him lies about wealth and privilege. Gianni sketches. Andrew reads Brideshead Revisited and chooses “Après moi, le dèluge” (“After me, the deluge”) as a quotation for the high-school yearbook. Gianni, hard-working and blessed with genius, establishes a world-recognized label. Andrew, good-looking and glibly sophisticated, becomes a gigolo to some very rich sugar daddies in San Diego.

Generally, though, being a kept man is not much better than being a kept dairy product — the expiration date comes soon. And so it happened with Cunanan.

Unloved, unsuccessful and increasingly untethered, was he jealous of Versace? Possibly. That would make this something like a serial killer’s Amadeus, with Cunanan as an especially crazed Salieri to Versace’s Mozart.

Still, none of this makes Cunanan comprehensible or, when all is said and done, pitiable. Otherwise, this might be In Cold Blood for fashionistas.

That said, it’s hard to gauge how well Criss’s performance works in such a tricky, diabolical role. He bears a striking physical resemblance to Cunanan, but he hasn’t been directed in a way that suggests the profoundly ambiguous core — admittedly, an oxymoron — of this man who could be both a smooth, adept dissembler and, as a killer, such a blundering, bloody improviser. To say that the surest approach to a character like this is sick humor — Christian Bale in American Psycho or even Kathleen Turner in Serial Mom — doesn’t mean it’s always the right way.

What places this Cunanan in the show’s broader context, and rather ingeniously, is his intuition of how he functions as a gay man, constantly calculating how much of himself he can safely risk revealing — how much he can get away with not as psychopath, but as a man. Pressing David Madson to be his accomplice in disposing of Jeff Trail’s body, he tells him not to call the police: “They hate us, they’ve always hated us. You’re a f–.”

We’re also reminded, painfully so, that Versace’s decision to come out of the closet with an interview in The Advocate had the potential to ruin his business (according to Orth, he was HIV-positive). Trail leaves the Navy in despair — here, we see him come close to hanging himself — because of its brutal, institutional bigotry. The FBI, questioning Versace’s lover Antonio D’Amico (Ricky Martin) after the murder, can’t quite grasp what a gay man’s “partner” would be. Even the old sugar daddies seem wary of anything outside their rich but circumscribed circle.

It’s a long way here from here to Call Me by Your Name.

‘American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace’ transcends the murder show genre by diving deep into the lives of the victims, and 90s gay culture

“American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace” is not what its subtitle suggests.

Instead, the murder of Gianni Versace in 1997 serves as a starting point into the story of his killer, Andrew Cuanan.

The show is a necessary and poignant examination of gay culture in the 90s.

Unlike other murder shows, it focuses on the lives of Cuanan’s victims, beyond the most famous one.

Darren Criss, Penelope Cruz, and Ricky Martin are excellent.

Want to learn about Gianni Versace, revolutionary fashion designer and gay icon? Looking for an in-depth, inside look at his July 1997 murder in Miami? Look somewhere else. Because while the title implies this is exactly what “American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace” is about, that’s only the starting point.

The series does give us a glimpse of Versace’s life — both his relationship with his long-time partner, Antonio D’Amico, and with his sister, Donatella (Penelope Cruz) — but the series also looks way beyond that, and is so much better for taking the risk.

Of all the TV that’s out there, and I know it’s overwhelming, this is a show you should set aside some time to watch.

The first season of “American Crime Story,” which premiered to critical acclaim in early 2016, followed the 1995 O.J. Simpson trial. It went on to win 9 Emmy Awards, including best limited series and best actress in a limited series for Sarah Paulson, who played prosecutor Marcia Clark. “The People vs O.J. Simpson” was inventive in the way it was told, with episodes not just from the perspectives of key players like O.J., the defense, and the prosecutors, but also the jurors.

Still, the season’s glaring flaw was that, like a lot of fiction and nonfiction work surrounding the O.J. case, the victims, Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman, were still just catalysts for a larger story.

But “Versace” recognized that flaw and made a show about the origins of a killer while focusing on all of his victims. The result is a fascinating examination of class, sexuality, and gay culture in the 90s.

The series starts with the assassination of Gianni Versace (Edgar Ramirez) at the hands of Andrew Cuanan (Darren Criss). From then on, Versace serves as a side character and a parallel to Cuanan.

Based on Maureen Orth’s book “Vulgar Favors: Andrew Cuanan, Gianni Versace and the Largest Failed Manhunt in U.S. History,” the series goes beyond its subtitle and tells a story that only a bold, visionary storyteller like executive producer and co-creator Ryan Murphy could tell in such a compelling, thoughtful, and colorful (literally and figuratively) way.

The series follows Cuanan on his journey of seducing wealthy men, becoming a part of their lives — and making a living off of them — then ultimately murdering them, brutally. Then, on to the next one. But the twist is that the story is told backwards, starting with the murder of Versace, and going backwards until, by the end of the season, we finally get a glimpse of Cuanan’s first crimes, which started with his complicated relationship with his father.

In the series’ stand-out episode (FX made 8 episodes of 9 available to the press), Judith Light guest stars as the conflicted wife of one of Cuanan’s victims: 72 year old Lee Miglin, a Chicago real-estate developer who was found dead in his home, bound with duct tape. Miglin’s wife goes out of her way to keep the news that her husband was murdered by a gay lover quiet, demonstrating that not so long ago, being gay was something most people wanted absolutely nothing to do with. The episode’s focus on what Light’s character goes through while finding out the truth about her husband — and what to do with it — separates this murder show from others before it, by not only showing the lives of the victims, but their loved ones as well.

The most captivating element of Cuanan’s story, as told in “Versace,” is the “what if.” If the detectives responsible for finding Cuanan hadn’t been blinded by gay stereotypes, maybe they would have stopped him before he killed more people, including Versace. Versace and his partner Antonio (played by a well-cast, natural Ricky Martin of “Livin La Vida Loca” fame) would have also led very different lives in a more accepting culture. And Donatella, too, whose disappointment in her brother’s lack of a leaving behind an heir for their fashion brand is the conflict that drives their story throughout the season.

The biggest surprise is also the best part of “Versace”: its star, Darren Criss. In his creepy and careful performance, Criss proves that he’s so much more than the performer I, and I’m sure many, assumed he was. Starting his film and television career on “Glee” as Blaine Anderson, a very mature high school student who belts Katy Perry songs at every moment possible, and venturing not much further from that in theater productions like “How to Succeed In Business Without Really Trying” and “Hedwig and the Angry Inch,” Criss’ transformative performance is one of those rare roles where you won’t be able to imagine anyone else but him playing it.

‘American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace’ transcends the murder show genre by diving deep into the lives of the victims, and 90s gay culture

Versace Represented a Fast Track to the American Dream

There’s a haunting scene about halfway through FX’s The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story where Andrew Cunanan (Darren Criss) dreams that he’s being fitted for a suit by Gianni Versace (Édgar Ramírez) — the man he will soon murder on the steps of his Miami Beach mansion. [Ed. note: While this story contains some light spoilers based on historical fact, they shouldn’t affect your enjoyment of the series whatsoever.]

“This world has wasted me,” Cunanan says, “while it has turned you, Mr. Versace, into a star.” His expression is steely, the scene bathed in lurid red light. “Was it the world, sir?” Versace asks quietly, implying that perhaps Cunanan’s own behavior might be to blame. “Oh, you think you’re better than me?” Cunanan shoot backs. “You’re not better than me. We’re the same. The only difference is you got lucky.”

Much like The People v. OJ Simpson, American Crime Story’s critically lauded first installment, Versace uses a famous murder as a jumping-off point to explore broader truths about our society and culture. Using Maureen Orth’s nonfiction bestseller Vulgar Favors: Andrew Cunanan, Gianni Versace, and the Largest Failed Manhunt in US History as its guide, the season examines Cunanan’s cross-country killing spree that culminated in the designer’s death. And in doing so, it paints a terrifying portrait of the dark underbelly of the American Dream.

The timing couldn’t be better for a series about the reckless, relentless pursuit of prosperity. Consider our current president, elevated on the political stage not for his experience or qualifications, but rather for his presumptive affluence and reality-TV fame. Not too long ago, about half of our country — many of them white and working-class — was sure that Donald Trump could bring back lost jobs and make America wealthy again. So focused were they on restoring the financial success they felt was their birthright, in fact, that they were able to overlook Trump’s habit of telling frequent, flagrant lies.

Our country’s millennials aren’t faring much better. We’re the first generation in modern history to be poorer than our parents, with a financial future crippled by debt, unemployment, and inflation. We’re getting married later, having children later, and buying homes later — that is, if we can afford to buy a home at all. The traditional American Dream has never felt further out of reach. What remains in its place, however, is the glimmering possibility of celebrity.

According to a 2017 study cited by Forbes, more than a quarter of millennials would quit their jobs in exchange for fame. Nearly a third would rather be famous than pursue a career as a doctor or lawyer. The barrier for entry to fame has never been lower thanks to social media, so it’s little wonder why many young people see it as a ticket to overnight success. Call it the new American Dream.

Cunanan, according to both the show and the book, desperately wanted to be famous. He grew up in a working-class San Diego suburb; his parents struggled to make ends meet, but lavished him with attention and praise to the exclusion of his three siblings. They sent him to an exclusive La Jolla private school, bought him a sports car well before he could legally drive, and even gave him the master bedroom in their home. “Every morning when you wake up, and every evening when you go to sleep, I want you to remember that you’re special,” Cunanan’s con-artist father, Modesto “Pete” Cunanan (Jon Jon Briones), tells his young son in one particularly memorable scene. “And that when you feel special, success will follow.”

A witty conversationalist with a reported genius-level IQ, Andrew Cunanan was special. But he was also a narcissist and a pathological liar who spun elaborate (and rather Trumpian) yarns about his upper-crust upbringing, first to his classmates and later to the older, wealthy men he wooed. Relying solely on charm and fanciful fabrication, Cunanan singled out high-rolling types who could finance the extravagant lifestyle he truly felt he deserved. His father, after all, had taught him that appearances — not accomplishments — were the key to success in life. But it wasn’t long until Cunanan’s combined superiority complex and materialism set him on a destructive (and, eventually, murderous) path.

While Cunanan’s precise motive for shooting Versace may still be unknown, the fashion giant’s fame and success in many ways made him the spree killer’s perfect target. With his grand homes in Milan, Miami Beach, Manhattan, and Lake Como, the designer had the real estate portfolio of Cunanan’s dreams. He dined in the finest restaurants, surrounded by boldfaced names; Cunanan, too, had a weakness for high-end cuisine, and would often treat his friends to fancy meals bankrolled by his older lovers. Versace had loads of famous friends and fans, too, from Princess Diana to Madonna — but more than that, he was famous in his own right.

Even the clothes Versace created oozed luxury. Marked by bold prints and bright colors, his designs referenced art, celebrity, and sex, all things Cunanan adored. Some found Versace’s signature aesthetic vulgar, but it’s precisely what contributed to his brand’s aspirational appeal — these were clothes clearly made by a rich person, for rich people. (It’s telling that in Showgirls, Elizabeth Berkley’s character splurges on a “Ver-sayce” dress in order to impress the Las Vegas crowd.) It’s not necessarily that Cunanan wanted a closetful of Versace to call his own — he preferred preppier, more conservative looks — but rather that he fetishized the qualities with which Versace’s clothes were synonymous: money, fame, and success.

“No other major fashion house in the world,” Business Week wrote at the time, “is so closely identified with the life-style of its marquee name designer.” Indeed, Versace’s larger-than-life persona is not only what taunted and tempted Cunanan in the ’90s, but what makes him just as captivating to revisit now, two full decades after his death. That same mythologizing, however, has also created conflict. Earlier this month, the Versace family issued a pair of statements denying its involvement with, and authorization of, Ryan Murphy’s show, calling Orth’s book “bogus” and “full of gossip and speculation.” FX responded with a memo of its own: “We stand by the meticulous reporting of Ms. Orth.”

Orth’s contention that Versace was HIV-positive — and the series’s subsequent portrayal of the designer as such — seems to be a particular point of contention for the family. Still, Murphy’s show paints Versace in a markedly positive light, showing how he overcame both humble beginnings and illness to become one of the world’s most celebrated couturiers.

As Orth reports, Gianni Versace and Andrew Cunanan “started out at roughly the same economic place,” setting him apart from the other famous figures the killer idolized. Born in Calabria, then one of Italy’s poorest regions, Versace developed an interest in fashion as a young boy, studying his dressmaker mother, Francesca, as she worked. In a later episode, we see Francesca offering to teach her son the tricks of the trade in the form of a pep talk that couldn’t be more different from Pete Cunanan’s: “You must do what you love, Gianni,” she says. “But it takes hard work and practice. You must learn how to sew, how to understand the fabrics.”

Versace did just that, and by the time he launched his namesake label in 1978, he already had two decades’s worth of design experience under his belt. With his sister Donatella (played on the series by Penélope Cruz) as his creative director and his brother Santo (portrayed by Giovanni Cirfiera) as his CEO, Versace built his family business from the bottom up, smartly tapping celebrities to fill his fashion shows and star in his campaigns. By the time he was slain in 1997, he’d created an $807 million fashion empire — based on talent and connections, yes, but also hard work.

Cunanan, of course, saw only the fruits of Versace’s labor, not the labor itself — nor the endless public scrutiny the designer faced as he grew more and more famous. According to Orth’s book, rumors swirled for years that the Versace family was tied up with the Mafia. “How else, the international fashion community wanted to know, could they have managed to come from nowhere, spend so lavishly, and keep open so many ‘empty’ boutiques?” she writes. The brand’s profitability, as well as Versace’s personal, profligate spending habits, were often questioned.

The designer’s sexuality, too, made him a target. offers a harrowing, heartbreaking reminder of just how much America’s attitude towards LGTBQ people has shifted since the ’90s, and not even icons like Versace were immune to discrimination. A pivotal scene in the series deals with the designer’s decision to publicly come out during a magazine interview, an incredibly bold move at the time; Donatella urges him to consider how his confession could damage their brand, pointing out how Perry Ellis’s sales slumped after it became clear he suffered from AIDS.

But in the opening sequence of ’s first episode, we don’t see a man defeated by press scandals or pushed into the closet by a homophobic society. All we see is a fashion genius striding down the halls of his opulent mansion, greeting his beautiful, uniformed staff, pausing on his balcony to admire the city he’s single-handedly transformed into a fashion capital. All we see is the dream.

Versace Represented a Fast Track to the American Dream

‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace’ Review: A Mild Second Helping of ‘American Crime Story’

Early on into the second season of American Crime Story, The Assassination of Gianni Versace, the titular victim, portrayed by Edgar Ramirez, is outfitting an opera singer with a dress and gives away his secret. He makes a number of final alterations and explains to her that the way he can tell if a piece is done is when the model looks happy in it, not when he’s happy with it. It’s the pleasure, trust, and comfort of others that gives him satisfaction, even as he follows his own unique track of taste when envisioning his latest lines of clothing.

The importance and danger of carefully tailored aesthetics is at the heart of Ryan Murphy‘s latest, in which he serves as executive producer and directs the first episode. Just as Versace tailored his works to suit the humans who wore them, Andrew Cunanan (Darren Criss), the man who killed Versace, tailored everything from his outfit to the way he spoke to blend in, to not be noticed unless he specifically wanted to be. He is the inverse of Versace, whose creations bore a boldness that initially hid his homosexuality and HIV-positive status. The show harps on the contrasting forces of Versace’s awakening as an out gay man with money, vision, and a dedicated partner (Ricky Martin) and Cunanan’s expertise at creating a pleasant, seemingly thoughtful exterior to hide an eternal emptiness. It’s interesting material but not long in, you wonder if that’s all Murphy and his creative team have on their mind.

In truth, the style of exteriors that Versace and Cunanan glom onto respectively feeds into one of Murphy’s chief obsessions: the art of storytelling. Where Versace uses stories to open up others and connect with them, Cunanan is written as a nimble yet desperate creator of his own history and personal experience. In an early scene, he’s confronted by a would-be lover about his constant lying, and eventually icily tell his friend that he just does what he has to fit in. It’s why he prepares a story about his mother’s time in Italy for Versace, who seemingly constantly ached for the days of his youth and his mother’s home in Calabria. In Murphy and company’s estimation, what both of these men understand is how personality and experience grip people, whether they happen to be illusory or not.

It would be unfair to say that Murphy’s series, as written by Tom Rob Smith, is as empty as Cunanan comes off as in the first few episodes, but there is a certain feeling of coasting here. The variety of personalities and levels of intimate detail that powered the first season of American Crime Story has been narrowed here to largely focus just on murderer and victim. Murphy and Smith add a number of characters to fill out the story, most notably Penelope Cruz‘s Donatella Versace, Gianni’s little sister and inheritor of his empire, but there’s a beguiling hesitancy to dig into their own interior lives in the same manner as Versace, Cunanan, and, to a far lesser extent, Martin’s Antonio D’Amico. The series’ one potent thematic idea is worn down to a nub by the time the third episode begins.

What’s left is all plot, a wildly interesting and entertaining story filmed and told competently with exuberant performances, but without much to say about what Versace’s death or Cunanan’s murder spree meant to Smith and Murphy. The only scenes that really pop are those in which Cunanan is trying to figure people out and, in response, attempts to figure his own sense of performance out. There’s a hypnotic sequence in which he nearly suffocates a potential victim with duct tape as he dances around in bikini briefs to Philip Bailey and Phil Collins’ “Easy Lover.” In moments like these, there’s a feeling that the show is trying to retread a similar path as American Psycho in critiquing an obsession with veneers and frivolous culture over the interior and personal mettle but it’s developed haphazardly and there’s no attempt to dig into the politics of the 1990s with any seriousness.

Most of all, The Assassination of Gianni Versace feels like Murphy’s victory lap after The People vs. O.J. Simpson did so well, both critically and amongst audiences. For all its weightlessness, Smith’s writing is propulsive and not without its flourishes of wit, and the cast elevates the more monotonous passages with physical vigor and an unwaveringly attentive sense of timing and delivery. Versace and Antonio’s relationship is delicately and convincingly rendered, which initially gives off the sense that Murphy is also attempting to discuss and critique the perception of AIDS, the fashion world, celebrities, and gay relationships in the 90s. If that’s so, none of it hits home beyond a base fascination, and the show’s creators seem a bit apprehensive of getting into the messy details, as much as their depiction of a working artist as with the meticulous planning of a serial killer or the building of a celebrity’s public persona and subsequent personal repression.

For those who have a fascination with serial killers, there’s bound to be something here that will exhilarate, even in its flippant treatment of sociopathic behavior and obsession. There’s even a notable reference to Tom Noonan‘s Red Dragon in Michael Mann‘s Manhunter that makes Murphy’s fondness for serial-killer dramas of the 1980s and 1990s palpable, but the style that he and his creative team fashion here is neither as dazzling and captivating as Versace’s nor as deceptive and studied as Cunanan’s. What might have been a furious reflection on the worth of style and aesthetic as compared to the humanity encased within such frames and settings is boiled down to an extensive Wikipedia page, more interested in the facts of the case than why the case was so important and shocking to the zeitgeist in the first place.

Rating: ★★ – Fair; Only for the dedicated.

‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace’ Review: A Mild Second Helping of ‘American Crime Story’

Opinion | ‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace’ is a chilly fable for the Trump era

This column discusses Andrew Cunanan’s crimes, which took place in 1997, and the treatment of them in “The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story,” which generally tracks with the facts. The series premieres on Jan. 17.

Once upon a time, there was a boy who yearned for all the things he believed America had promised him: wealth, respect, access to the finest things and the most sophisticated people. But he had a strange resistance to pursuing the substance of those goals, rather than the appearance of them. He scorned hard work and legitimate achievement as ordinary, delusions for suckers who couldn’t embrace a workaround. He overvalued himself and then was shocked when the people around him detected that what he presented as gold was actually dross. And yet, despite the increasing risks that he would be exposed, he continued to pursue this gambit to the point of self-destruction.

It may sound like I’m talking about the president of the United States: After all, the defining feature of the Trump administration is a confusion about what’s ersatz and what’s real, and why the distinction matters. But, in fact, I’m describing Andrew Cunanan, the serial killer who murdered the designer Gianni Versace and four other men, and who is the subject of the latest installment of Ryan Murphy’s “American Crime Story” franchise, in which Cunanan is played by Darren Criss. I didn’t always enjoy watching “The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story,” which is substantially more brutal and substantially less inclined to paint a truly broad social portrait than “The People v. O.J. Simpson.” But it’s still got a chilly resonance, even if it’s not the one Murphy intended.

Murphy said when the series was in production that he was interested in “More than why [Versace] was killed … was why it was allowed to happen,” something that he attributes to a homophobic reluctance by law enforcement agencies to work with the gay community. He’s also suggested that Cunanan’s murders took on an intellectual quality, that he murdered victims “specifically to shame them and out them and have a form of payback for a life that he felt he could not live.”

Having seen eight of the nine episodes of the mini-series, I’m not convinced that this installment of the franchise makes either of those cases effectively, or even that homophobia is what the series is actually most interested in.

The series is full of deft little sketches that detail how homosexuality made an impact on the lives of Cunanan and his victims. Gayness was something Cunanan lied about, even when it was unnecessary. Homosexuality was a deception at the heart of Lee Miglin’s (Mike Farrell) marriage to Marilyn Miglin (Judith Light) that became unsustainable after Cunanan killed him and the police struggled to understand the connection between the two men. The series presents sexual orientation as a source of David Madson’s (Cody Fern) sensitivity and creative insight, qualities Cunanan envied but couldn’t emulate or ultimately lock down by convincing Madson to marry him. For Versace (Edgar Ramirez), gayness seemed to be a professional obstacle and ultimately wasn’t. Most searingly, homophobia was the factor that ended Jeff Trail’s (Finn Wittrock) Navy career and set him profoundly adrift, leaving him vulnerable to Cunanan, who came to believe that Trail somehow owed him.

But it’s simply not clear that gayness or homophobia was the key dynamic in any of the murders. Even as presented by “American Crime Story,” Cunanan killed Trail out of jealousy; Madson, who witnessed the first killing, out of self-preservation; Miglin for his money and car; William Reese (Gregg Lawrence) for his truck; and Versace in a bid at notoriety and an expression of jealousy. And the cops fade from the story so quickly that even if law enforcement is the sole subject of the final episode of the series, it will be hard to argue that law enforcement homophobia is a major subject of “The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story.”

Instead, the key through lines are covetousness and entitlement. Time and time again, Cunanan seems baffled by people who are dedicated to the idea of substantive accomplishment.

He’s bored by Lee Miglin’s excitement about his dream architectural project and impatient with David Madson’s dedication to his work. He’s furious with Jeff Trail’s insistence that he misses the meaning he found in the Navy, rather than focusing on the homophobia that made it impossible for him to stay in the service. When an accomplished older patron reveals that he’s figured out just how much Cunanan is lying to him and suggests that he’s willing to support Cunanan in his efforts to get an education, it’s hard to tell what horrifies Cunanan most: the idea that he’s been discovered, or that he might actually try to make the accomplishments he’s claimed real. And most disturbingly, Cunanan appears entirely unable to understand why Gianni Versace is successful and acclaimed but he is not.

“The Assassination of Gianni Versace” doesn’t quite penetrate Cunanan’s delusions, though it does journey into his childhood for the supposed source of them, a trip that turns out to be less immediately revealing than the show imagines it to be. But what it does do over and over in its reversed chronology is show why people fell for Cunanan in the first place and how they came to realize his falseness.

The show is most effective when it’s debunking our self-delusion that we’d never be dumb enough to fall for someone so obviously fake and dishonest. Miglin, Madson, Trail and many of Cunanan’s other friends, acquaintances and lovers are all smart, accomplished people. But they all had something they wanted or needed that Cunanan was, for a brief period, able to supply: He could play a convincing and grateful lover, bolster the confidence of a young man venturing out into the world, provide an introduction to gay bars and gay life, talk about the opera, decorate a house. That they eventually realized the limits of Cunanan’s performance was to their credit; that their good sense and intelligence wasn’t enough to save them from him is a tragedy.

Most of us won’t face consequences this severe on the occasions that we allow ourselves to be taken in. Even on a national level, the fraud we’re presently entangled with is playing out more in terms of collective degradation and a dismantling of the social safety net, rather ending in a claw hammer to the face. Which is not to say we shouldn’t be profoundly frightened by this present moment. “The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story” is a story about a clash between falseness and authenticity where the former destroyed the latter before being destroyed in turn. Though it has a terrible cost, that’s a more comforting narrative than the one we’re living through. This time around, fakery outflanked reality, and it’s not clear that enough people care to tell the difference.

Opinion | ‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace’ is a chilly fable for the Trump era

Roush Review: ‘American Crime Story’ Profiles Versace’s Murderer

Though top billing goes to the celebrated fashion designer, slain on the steps of his South Beach mansion in 1997, The Assassination of Gianni Versace is mostly about the tragically twisted psyche of his murderer, Andrew Cunanan. Which makes this second edition of Ryan Murphy’s American Crime Story franchise scarier than any season of American Horror Story, because (excepting the usual docudrama embellishments) this is real.

Opening in an operatic flourish with the shocking execution of Versace (an affecting Edgar Ramirez), the nine-part series goes backward in time, episode by episode, to reveal in meticulous and lurid detail what led the handsomely lethal Cunanan (Glee’s Darren Criss in an electrifying and layered breakthrough performance) to this terrible act. The details are less familiar than the O.J. Simpson trial, the subject of Crime Story’s acclaimed first season, which makes the reverse chronology of the parallel narratives even more compelling and disturbing.

While Versace comes into focus as a passionate creative force who worked diligently for his fame and remained devoted to those who loved him, including his combative sister Donatella (Penelope Cruz), Cunanan commands his own spotlight in a delusional world of preening entitlement and toxic narcissism, warped further by the pervasive homophobia of the times.

Preparing to come out openly as gay, Versace is reminded by Donatella “how ugly the world can be.” This isn’t news to the viewer, who sees Cunanan use his veneer of seductive sophistication to prey on vulnerable and closeted men, from wealthy older marks (including strong turns by Mike Farrell and Michael Nouri) to insecure peers, always spinning increasingly ludicrous webs of self-promoting fantasy. As one catty observer mocks: “What a volatile mix you are: too lazy to work, too proud to be kept.”

He forgot “psycho.”

The arc of Crime Story contrasts the authenticity of Versace’s achievements with the poisonously hollow fakery of Cunanan’s drug-fueled obsession with fortune and fame. “For me, being told no is like being told I don’t exist,” he confesses.

So when he’s ultimately rejected by his younger victims, the heartbreaking Finn Wittrock as a conflicted ex-Navy officer and Cody Fern as the unwilling object of his desire, Cunanan’s downward spiral propels him to stalk the superstar living the life he feels he deserves. The rest, as they say, is infamy.

Roush Review: ‘American Crime Story’ Profiles Versace’s Murderer

The Versace ‘American Crime Story’ is a chilling thriller

On July 15, 1997, fashion designer Gianni Versace was just coming back to his Miami home after a morning walk when he was shot to death on the street by Andrew Cunanan, a petty thief, con man, and, it turned out, a serial killer — Versace was only his biggest-name victim. This is the subject of The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story, the new miniseries that starts Wednesday night on FX. It’s another big-canvas, pop-culture epic overseen by producer-director-writer Ryan Murphy, and features an exceptional performance by one of the performers Murphy made into a star on Glee: Darren Criss, as a chilling Cunanan.

At the start, the production goes back and forth between the story of Versace (played with skill and a notable physical resemblance by Edgar Ramirez), seen initially at the height of his worldwide fashion fame, and Cunanan, angry and miserable, living an impoverished street life. It’s fun to see Penélope Cruz do such a good job of inhabiting the platinum-blond hair and pouty poker-face of Versace’s sister, Donatella, and Ricky Martin exudes a lot of smooth charm as Antonio D’Amico, Versace’s significant other. As a fashion heathen, I appreciated the way Murphy and novelist Tom Rob Smith (adapting Maureen Orth’s book Vulgar Favors) vividly sketch the reasons Versace was considered such an innovative designer, and as the nine-part series proceeds, there are occasional jumps back in time for us to witness Versace’s youth and the hard work that went into building his empire.

The real focus of Assassination, however, is on the assassin. The majority of this season’s American Crime Story (following the Emmy-winning The People v. O.J. Simpson) is a deep exploration of Cunanan. A charming gay man who used his sexuality to both attract and exploit, the Cunanan as presented by Murphy and Smith is a tortured soul for whom we cannot ultimately feel much sympathy. For long stretches, Versace disappears from the production so that we can meet some of Cunanan’s other victims, such as Cody Fern’s fledgling architect David Madson, and Finn Wittrock’s poignant take on Navy veteran Jeff Trail; their stories are told with nearly the same degree of thoroughness as Versace’s.

Along the way, Murphy and company tell a cultural and political history of gay strife, from the AIDS epidemic to the fight for gay marriage to the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. The fractured narrative timeline — the story is told in reverse chronological order, jumping back and forth, here and there, across the trail of Cunanan’s various crimes — can sometimes seem gratuitously confusing, but once you get used to its rhythm, this American Crime Story has an irresistible pull.

Versace is filled with excellent smaller performances, such as New Girl’s Max Greenfield, so fine as a slimy South Beach hustler who briefly partners up with Cunanan, and M*A*S*H’s Mike Farrell, superb as Cunanan’s wealthy older victim Lee Miglin, portrayed here as man pathetically grateful for Andrew’s condescending attentions. With the Simpson miniseries and now Versace, it may be that Murphy has found his true métier: The true-crime genre anchors his sometimes wild flights of fancy to enough solid facts to give his lyricism weight — dramatic gravitas.

The Versace ‘American Crime Story’ is a chilling thriller

‘Assassination of Gianni Versace’: Sex, Lies, Fashion and Homophobia

The summer of 1997: Fashion designer Gianni Versace wakes up in his Miami Beach mansion, wearing pajama bottoms decorated with his own logo. He slips into a hot-pink robe, then steps out onto the balcony to admire the morning sun over the ocean waves. He strolls through his gilded palace, greeting the servants who are already standing at attention in their places. Versace plucks a glass of orange juice from a silver tray as he lounges to have breakfast – alone – by his pool. Meanwhile, a psychopathic serial killer sits on the beach, with a handgun and a biography of Vogue founder Condé Nast. Within a few minutes, Versace will be dead.

The murder was a crime that shocked the world – a haute couture icon gunned down at the gates of his own mansion. In other words, a crime perfectly designed for Ryan Murphy’s pulp imagination. He brings the case to life as the second installment of his American Crime Storyanthology series, after making a huge splash with The People vs. O.J. Simpson. The Assassination of Gianni Versace has all his favorite obsessions – sex, money, celebrity, glitz, the elusive boundaries of gay identity. The designer was such a central figure in American culture in 1997, namechecked by Biggie in the summer’s ubiquitous hit “Hypnotize.” By the end of that summer, both the hip-hop legend and the fashion maven were handgun-murder victims, and Puff Daddy was onstage at the MTV Video Music Awards with Sting, urging the crowd to raise their hands for Biggie, Tupac … and Gianni Versace.

The People vs. O.J. Simpson was an L.A. story, and the Hollywood setting was part of why it worked so well, plugging veterans from John Travolta to David Schwimmer to Sterling K. Brown into the action – truly a story where Los Angeles plays itself. But Assassination begins with the crime, then moves backward through the career of his killer Andrew Cunanan, a con man and grifter who was already on the FBI’s Most Wanted list after murdering four other men around the country that year. The story, scripted by Tom Rob Smith (London Spy), leaves the Versace-murder narrative on the backburner for much of the series, going into the backstory of how a closeted gay kid turned himself into a homicidal monster.

Darren Criss, leaving Glee far behind, is oily and terrifying as Cunanan, with desperate need in his eyes. It’s there in the way he primps for his first date with Versace back in 1990, after the designer invites him to the opera; he tries on somebody else’s expensive suits while the radio plays Lisa Stansfield’s “Been Around The World.” (By 1997, that was more famous as a Biggie/Puffy song.) He’s a social climber who sees Versace as his big score, even as he scoffs at the duds: “They say Armani designs clothes for wives. I think Versace designs clothes for sluts.”

Edgar Ramírez is charismatic yet warmly empathetic as Versace – as in his astounding performance as a Seventies terrorist in Carlos, the Venezuelan actor plays a man obsessed with his vision, determined to serve it at any cost. Ricky Martin, in a performance way beyond what most people would expect from him, is Versace’s bereaved boyfriend Antonio D’Amico. Together they became a quintessential jet-set couple known around the globe, moving in rarefied circles. At Versace’s funeral, Princess Diana sat next to Elton John; just a few weeks later, the Goodbye Yellow Brick Roadhitmaker was singing “Candle in the Wind” at her funeral.

Penélope Cruz is simply fearsome as the designer’s sister Donatella, who is no longer content to be a muse; she wants her own stake in running the business. She’s icy and imperious in her contempt for his boyfriend. “My brother has a weakness for beauty,” Donatella sniffs. “He forgives it anything. But I am not my brother.” She is such a flamboyant character, it’s difficult to play her without parody – as in Maya Rudolph’s great Saturday Night Live caricature, a diva constantly shrieking, “Cue the rampage music!” But Cruz’s Donatella is no caricature; she’s ruthless in her resolve to keep the House of Versace alive as an aesthetic. As the lady says, “My brother is still alive as long as Versace is still alive. I will not allow that man, that nobody, to kill my brother twice.”

A tragic theme that runs through the story is the way gay culture was changing at warp speed through the Nineties. It seemed like a much more liberated time than the Eighties, yet Assassinationdepicts how oppressive the closet still was in 1997. It was the year Ellen DeGeneres came out as a lesbian on her sitcom, after dropping hints she was “left-handed” or “Lebanese.” Will & Grace was still a year away; the idea of gay marriage seemed like an impossible dream. The cops in charge of the Versace case are baffled at the unthinkable notion of a gay couple sharing a domestic partnership – the officer who interrogates the boyfriend asks, “What was your involvement with Mr. Versace?” The FBI agents are blinded by homophobia as they snicker over the pronunciation of Versace’s name. (“The singer?” “That’s Liberace – this is the jeans guy.”)

Although the Versace family has already denounced the series, this new American Crime Story presents the designer as a genuinely heroic figure: a visible gay man in the Nineties, living outside the closet in ways that would have been inconceivable a decade earlier. Part of the emotional power of Assassination is that the designer, in his own way, was helping the world make the transition into a different place – a transition he tragically didn’t live long enough to see.

‘Assassination of Gianni Versace’: Sex, Lies, Fashion and Homophobia

‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story’ Review: A Disturbing and Confusing Horror Story

It’s fitting that the second season of FX’s American Crime Story is centered around the murder of Gianni Versace, because the series feels like style over substance. It’s like a high-end dress you’d see on a runway in Milan, something that looks ornate and artistic, but which is wholly impractical to wear.

The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story (a cumbersome title) is surprisingly not focused on the fashion designer, played by Edgar Ramirez, who was shot in front of his Miami mansion in 1997. Instead, the focus is entirely on the assassin, Andrew Cunanan (Glee’s Darren Criss), a pathological liar, con artist and sociopath who went on a murder spree that culminated with Versace.

The show is essentially told in the style of the film Memento, a series of flashbacks that will slowly reveal the motivations and origins of Cunanan’s spree and his killing of Versace. The stylistic choice is one that will largely determine how much you enjoy the series.

For me (and I presume many others), Versace’s death and the four people Cunanan killed prior to him is not as well-known as the O.J. Simpson trial. It was a big story, but not one that captured America’s collective attentions for months and months. As a result, using a complicated storytelling structure makes American Crime Story difficult to invest in. Characters are introduced at the end of their stories, and then subsequent episodes offer insights into who they were and what led to their circumstances.

But the style and structure are merely a distraction from what, at its heart, is a terrifying and fascinating portrait of a serial killer. Cunanan, as a character, is disturbing and Criss’ performance has an eerie lack of emotion that suits the show. The limited series travels down Cunanan’s psychological rabbit hole, and contrasting him with Gianni Versace only helps to illustrate how deranged Cunanan is.

The cast also includes Penelope Cruz as Gianni’s sister, Donatella, and singer Ricky Martin as Gianni’s long-time partner and lover. But the show largely wastes both of them, giving them almost nothing to do and having them both disappear for several episodes at a time. Othfer major characters, friends of Cunanan played by Cody Fern and Finn Wittrock, don’t show up until the fourth episode, but become very important.

The series works best as a psychological drama, revealing piece-by-piece how and why Cunanan assassinated Versace and four other people. The flaws, however, lie in the fundamental structure of the season itself and perhaps in the violence. While the first season of American Crime Story was more of a sociological look at race and the judicial system, this season actually shows the demented and depraved violence, occasionally feeling more like a season of American Horror Story.

There are intriguing elements to American Crime Story’s sophomore season, especially how it uses the misconceptions and shame of homosexuality in the ‘90s that led to some police mistakes and may provide some insight into how Cunanan was able to elude capture for so long. But overall, the show feels unfocused, with its overly complex structure and lack of a consistent supporting cast.

‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story’ Review: A Disturbing and Confusing Horror Story

The Assassination of Gianni Versace has main character confusion

The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story is a riveting experiment that falsifies its results. The show — which succeeds Ryan Murphy’s exceptional The People vs. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story — ostensibly addresses the assassination of its subject, the Italian designer (played by the excellent Edgar Ramirez) shot to death on the steps of his Miami villa. It is, alas, misleadingly named. The show’s focus quickly turns to Versace’s serial killer, Andrew Cunanan, a shape-shifting con artist played with sinister elan by Darren Criss, and his various victims.

That slippage is deliberate: Like Murphy’s other projects — O.J. Simpson, Feud — the series uses a specific case to build out a larger social history. Where The People vs. O.J. illuminated the fraught context in which the trial took place, where Feud mined a scandalous rivalry for a bigger story about ambient misogyny, Versace attempts a fascinating anthropology of ‘90s-era homosexuality and attendant homophobia, the social ramifications of which allowed a serial killer to keep killing. It’s an ambitious undertaking that aggressively short-changes its nominal celebrity. The results — some of which are quite moving — are fascinating but mixed.

The trouble is that some of the show’s most interesting moves don’t track. Versace is so formally adventurous that it sometimes loses control of its own effects. The season lurches backwards in fits and starts, rewinding from Versace’s assassination to Cunanan’s encounters with his other four (known) victims. Sometimes the story moves forward, sometimes backwards. It works for awhile: I was rapt until I realized I’d lost track — things I’d assumed came after happened before, and vice-versa, and it wasn’t clear why the facts were presented in that particular order because they weren’t just failing to build; they seemed to collapse.

Take Cunanan. This should be one of television’s great villains, and he almost is (thanks to Criss’ cunning, smart-muppet charm). But he’d be a marvelous character if he made any real sense. The difficulty is that the real Andrew Cunanan shot himself a few days after killing Versace and left no note; his motivations are a mystery, and he remains a cipher. Murphy, who usually has too much source material, in this case has too little. The show can’t quite decide how to deal with this. It vacillates between truthful ambiguity and irresponsibly doubling down on rumor. (There’s no proof, for instance, that Cunanan and Versace ever met prior to the shooting, but in Versace they certainly did. Cunanan’s reasons for murdering a Chicago tycoon were unknown; it was rumored at the time that his son was an associate of Cunanan’s. The story was retracted and became a kind of example of reckless journalism. In lieu of exploring the work of those ugly rumors and others, like the theory that Cunanan had AIDS and was killing the men who gave it to him, Versace doubles down: Cunanan definitely had a sexual relationship with the tycoon, it says! And, as if to amplify the thing further, upgrades a famous ham sandwich left at a crime scene into an even more sinister ham).

This divided approach to filling in the historical record produces a character who doesn’t quite rhyme with himself. What does it mean that Cunanan, a self-aggrandizing liar whose dishonesty (it’s repeatedly suggested) is calibrated to compensate for the fact that he wasn’t loved, turns out to have been loved? And not just loved, but obsessed over and badly spoiled? Scandal and murder shows are always most interesting when they take up the question of how we told the story as it was happening, and that twist — if it qualifies as one — could be an opportunity to send up ’90s pop psychology. The show could have spun that earlier theory of Cunanan as society’s too-charitable reading of a monster, or pilloried its easy assumptions about the home lives that “produce” gay men. But instead of corralling that range of possibilities into a consistent account of Cunanan, or some interesting point about how foolishly we theorize serial killers (or homosexuality), the show goes limp. Oddly inert, it just sort of lets every version of Cunanan exist. Sometimes he’s awkward, stilted, and so obvious that his stories fool no one. Other times he’s gifted and manipulative. A brilliant and glamorous shapeshifter. A sad con man.

The pilot is stunning, both in its own right and for how well it captures this slight incoherence. It begins with camerawork that’s pleasingly lush and limited in its omniscience. Directed by Murphy, the opening sequence is every bit as excessive and ornate as its putative subject’s Greek-inspired designs. It looms through and over Versace’s gorgeous villa and whizzes in and out and around, sometimes rising up to look down at the magnificent architectural symmetry of the environment Versace created for himself, and his own elegant asymmetry within it. It’s dazzling, and the contrast between Versace’s gilded aesthetic and his antagonist couldn’t be clearer: We first encounter Cunanan looking grubby and nervous. His backpack is sad. He screams into the ocean. He runs to a filthy toilet and vomits.

But that spectacular aesthetic contrast between Versace and his killer really only serves that specific moment; it sputters out. As we get to know him better, it seems less and less likely that Cunanan would be that hysterically nervous; he’s shown killing other times with total sangfroid.

The vertiginous effect of Versace’s erratic chronology is compounded by the series’ equally experimental approach to point of view. Versace starts off as a kind of equal participant in the story of his demise, with Ricky Martin playing Antonio D’Amico, his lover of 15 years. (This is brilliant casting, and the story of Martin’s own celebrity journey out of the closet — which in some ways parallels Versace’s — elevates this subplot into really exceptional metacommentary. I wish he’d been given more to do.) The show treats Versace, his vision, his artistry, and his company with great tenderness. Penelope Cruz does a creditable Donatella. But a few episodes in, it’s not only abandoned Versace’s point of view — and Donatella’s, and Antonio’s — it’s followed an entirely different character into the afterlife.

These are puzzling choices, but Versace makes up for an overall lack of discipline with real virtuosity at the level of the individual scene, and great performances to boot. Cody Fern and Finn Wittrock are terrific as David Madson and Jeff Trail, a couple of Cunanan’s victims whose stories are so engaging they end up irrevocably distorting the show’s frame. Judith Light’s Marilyn Miglin is a triumph, and I can’t say enough about Ramirez’ Versace. Criss lends a very oddly-written character so much malice, bravado, and pathos that you wink easily at the discrepancies. Only when they stack up do you start to mind.

Ultimately, I think Versace suffers a little from the fact that its real protagonist isn’t famous. Infamy isn’t quite the same thing, and fame, not its opposite, is really what anchors these double-edged Murphy projects: O.J. Simpson’s status as an American hero authorized his function as symbol as well as character in The People vs. O.J. Simpson, just as Bette Davis and Joan Crawford’s fame elevated them so that — in Feud — their story accrued larger, more resonant layers. That Versace isn’t quite as interested in the celebrity at its ostensible center means the story toggles between the awful, violent specificity of its murderer’s pathology and the homophobic history it’s trying to wrap that story in. It’s a fascinating effort, even if it doesn’t quite live up (or down) to its name.

The Assassination of Gianni Versace has main character confusion