You finally need two hands to count all the current TV shows with Asian American protagonists. Fresh Off the Boat (ABC) and Master of None(Netflix) arrived with fanfare for breaking ground (though a third season of Aziz Ansari’s romantic comedy was uncertain even before the star’s current scandal), while Quantico (ABC) and Into the Badlands (AMC) keeping chugging along, and the comedy Brown Nation (Netflix) and children’s melodrama Andi Mack (Disney Channel) have yet to become blips on the mainstream pop cultural radar. So it’s a bit strange, and off-putting, that the latest series with an Asian lead—one of the most anticipated shows of the year, it so happens—isn’t being described as such. In fact, its network—once a standard-bearer for prestige TV’s lack of diversity—is highlighting the drama’s focus on queerness and homophobia—and by doing so largely erasing its main character’s racial identity, especially in the first half of his story.

The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story isn’t about the titular victim but his killer: Andrew Cunanan, a San Diego native born to a Filipino father and an Italian American mother. Writer Tom Rob Smith adapted journalist Maureen Orth’s nonfiction account Vulgar Favors, structuring the episodes in reverse chronological order so we work backward from Versace’s murder. In a recent interview, Smith said of his source material that it “reads very much like an outsider commenting on a world of which they’re not part, and sometimes that can make you seem quite removed from it.” I agree with his assessment; Orth’s book includes lengthy and salacious discussions of Versace’s HIV status and the popularity of meth among gay communities. But Smith’s description could also be turned on The Assassination of Gianni Versace, which is a white writer’s dramatization of another white writer’s interpretation. American Crime Story’s first season, The People v. O.J. Simpson, tackled issues of both race and gender skillfully; there’s no reason why we should accept any less from its second.

The show’s Andrew, played by Darren Criss, does mention his father’s plantation in the Philippines early on. But between his pathological lying and that country’s colonial past, his race isn’t confirmed till about midway through the nine-hour season. A few character details here and there suggest Andrew’s racial self-hatred and the prevalence of anti-Asian racism within the gay community, but the relative sparseness of these implications is all the more noteworthy in contrast with the richly developed portrait of the decade’s homophobia.

Credit where it’s due, even if the bar for praise here is laughably low because Hollywood’s institutional aversion toward Asian stories and characters remains so entrenched: In casting Glee’s Criss (who played Blaine Anderson), Ryan Murphy hired a half-Filipino (if white-passing) actor to play the half-Filipino role of Andrew Cunanan. Criss is excellent, and in later episodes, the Philippines-born Broadway performer Jon Jon Briones is electrifying as Andrew’s father, the sociopathic Modesto, who teaches his favorite child all the wrong lessons about the American dream.

If The Assassination of Gianni Versace feels urgent as it revisits the stifling homophobia of the ’90s, it’s far less successful in reimagining Cunanan from a racialized point of view, at least in the first eight episodes. (The season finale was not provided to critics in advance.) It’s certainly not as if those racial and ethnic depictions of Cunanan don’t exist. In his analysis of the divergent foci of the mainstream American and Filipino American media narratives about Cunanan, scholar Allan Punzalan Isaac notes that the former wagged its tongue about his “deviant” sexuality (Tom Brokaw infamously referred to the killer as a “homicidal homosexual”), while consumers of the latter looked on with a mixture of “pleasure and horror.” The horror is understandable enough. The pleasure, perhaps, is easier to grasp when you’re part of a group whose presence and history are constantly made invisible by the larger American culture. “Perhaps [the Filipino American fascination with Cunanan] stemmed from a longing to be reflected in the small screen in this American media sensation,” Isaac wrote several years after Cunanan’s death. Filipinos preferred participation, he conjectures, in “any American drama, even for the wrong reasons.”

Nearly all of the eight Filipino American scholars, activists, and advocates I talked to for this story say that Cunanan has fallen out of popular Filipino American lore, just as he’s been forgotten by American pop culture until now. Professor Christine Bacareza Balance told me in an email interview that when she polled 40 or so students in a recent Filipino American Studies course, only one or two knew who Cunanan was. But among gay Filipino Americans, he remains something of a cult figure and for a few Filipino American writers, a literary muse. Isaac begins his seminal book about Filipino American identity, American Tropics, with a meditation on Cunanan’s incarnation of many of the concepts central to his subject: the possibility of “assimilation gone wrong,” the fear of rejection and the eagerness to belong, the embodiment of Filipino/American “mestizo” beauty standards, the corresponding ethnic ambiguity. (Isaac quotes a New York Times article describing Cunanan’s face as “so nondescript that it appears vaguely familiar to just about everyone.”) Paul Ocampo, a co-chair of the Lacuna Giving Circle, a philanthropic group that fosters leadership in LGBTQ Asian American communities, offers a more cynical interpretation: “There’s an aspect of the glitter and glitz of Hollywood to this story that attracts many in the Filipino American community more than the macabre.”

It’s important to remember that Cunanan murdered five people, apparently in cold blood. His victims deserve to be mourned. But in the absence of other well-known personages (or the inconspicuousness of many successful celebrities’—e.g., Bruno Mars’— Filipino-ness,), it’s perhaps inevitable that some Filipino Americans see or project certain facets of themselves in one of the very few Filipino Americans to appear on TV and on page 1, especially during that era. Ben de Guzman, a policy advocate in D.C., saw Cunanan on the news and thought, There but for the grace of God go I. “As a young, gay Filipino American man who was around his age when he was in the news,” de Guzman recalls via email, “I was forced to look at how the same forces of homophobia and racism that informed my life must have affected him too.”

The former party boy and escort remains a symbol of queer defiance for some in the gay Filipino American community. “Here was a gay Filipino man who seemed unapologetic and daring in his acceptance of his sexuality,” says Ocampo. “In this, he seemed to exude a self-possession that many people struggle with.” Balance says that the image of Cunanan as a “queer Asian/Filipino American on the warpath” “truly goes against many dominant representations within ‘mainstream’ U.S. media.” Isaac contrasts Cunanan’s narrative with the gay/bi film Call Me by Your Name, which he observes is “set outside the U.S., outside the AIDS scare, outside any class conflict—all part of the Cunanan spectacle.” Isaac seems to anticipate a reckoning as Cunanan’s story unfurls on the series: “How is this story of intergenerational sex, wealth, casual prostitution, and reckless living in the gay demimonde of the ’90s to be received in this age of domesticated gay marriage?”

And if Cunanan’s messy and unpredictable life story seems ripe for fictional inspiration, The Assassination of Gianni Versace certainly didn’t get there first. A decade after Cunanan’s death, novelist and playwright Jessica Hagedorn (a canonical Filipino American writer), along with songwriter Mark Bennett, launched in the killer’s hometown a workshop production of their musical Most Wanted, a thinly fictionalized version of Cunanan’s story that explores media sensationalism and marginalized individuals’ desperation to belong. Smaller-scale works like Regie Cabico’s poem “Love Letter From Andrew Cunanan,” Gina Apostol’s short story “Cunanan’s Wake,” and Jason Luz’s erotic short story “Scherzo for Cunanan” likewise attempt to humanize a murderer who, while deplorable for his actions and indisputably extreme in personality, almost certainly had some desires and experiences common to many Filipino Americans. None of these works add up to a complete portrait, or could. But created from Filipino American perspectives, they explore the aspects of Cunanan’s life that white America still isn’t fully grappling with.

The Deracination of Andrew Cunanan

In 1997, Andrew Cunanan, a 27-year-old gay man, shot and killed the designer Gianni Versace in front of his South Beach mansion, at the end of a murder spree that had already left four men dead. Upon executing the famous Versace, a self-made, openly gay Italian who had launched a global fashion house, Cunanan became infamous, a tabloid sensation intimately connected to both glamorous and seedy circles of gay life in 1990s America. But as notorious as Cunanan became, his fame was not particularly lasting. His is not a household name, so much as a Googleable one—or at least that was the case before the arrival of FX’s fascinating, creepy The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story, which would more aptly be titled The Murders of Andrew Cunanan. Versace is just the name on the label.

The Assassination of Gianni Versace follows the stellar The People v. O.J. Simpson, but it does not share that series’ mood. The People v. O.J. was more fun than is strictly appropriate for a story about the brutal murder of two innocent people, but this inappropriateness—the wad of bubblegum in the blood splatter—made it just campy enough to reflect the larger-than-life, wilder-than-fiction aspect of the actual O.J. spectacle. The series was superficially coy about O.J.’s guilt, a reflection of a larger cultural consensus that the racial politics of the case are too fraught to adjudicate. The murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman were the catalysts, but not the focus of the series, an American saga crammed with big personalities, bad perms, bigoted cops, corrupt policing, domestic abuse, football, money, power, sex, and race.

The Assassination of Gianni Versace, by comparison, is sickening and sweaty, a grisly story that does not allow audiences to look away from the murders, because the murders are its very subject, as is the murderer. Cunanan (Darren Criss), not Versace (Édgar Ramírez), is the protagonist. Written almost entirely by Tom Robb Smith and based on Vulgar Favors, Maureen Orth’s nonfiction account of Cunanan’s crimes, The Assassination of Gianni Versace shares a producing team with The People v. O.J. Simpson, but Ryan Murphy’s touch is much more apparent: Entire episodes play out like a restrained installment of his American Horror Story. The series unfolds in reverse chronological order, beginning in 1997 in South Beach on the morning of Versace’s murder, and then making its way backward, episode by episode, through Cunanan’s life, the four other murders, and all the way to his uniquely troubled childhood, when he was taught that it doesn’t matter who you are so long as what you have appears expensive enough, a perverse version of the American Dream.

As played by Criss, who previously appeared in Murphy’s Glee, Cunanan is creepily mesmerizing, a manic, chilling pathological liar. He’s charming, smart, spoiled, volatile, and has a gaping void where a self should be. Criss’ performance is so good that it upends The Assassination of Gianni Versace: Where Cuba Gooding Jr.’s lackluster performance pushed O.J. to the margins of his own story, Criss, aided by scripts, pushes everyone else aside. Versace and his family, his boyfriend, Antonio D’Amico (Ricky Martin), and his sister, Donatella (Penélope Cruz), have substantial parts only in the first two episodes, before becoming supporting characters. They do not appear in the third or fourth episodes at all, and are used sparingly in the rest of the series, too noble and decent to as larkishly entertaining as, say, John Travolta’s Robert Shapiro.

Homophobia infects every aspect of the story, as intrinsic to it as racism and sexism were to The People v. O.J. Simpson. (Racism is also a part of The Assassination of Gianni Versace: Cunanan’s father was Filipino, and Cunanan spent much of his life posing as Andrew DeSilva, passing himself off as entirely Italian.) Two decades ago, Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell was the law of the land, AIDS deaths had recently peaked, and the closet was deeper, darker, and far more densely populated. The show takes place almost entirely in a gay world, one that is self-protectively isolated from the mainstream and uniquely vulnerable to its own members. (A vast FBI manhunt, for example, failed to find Cunanan because the bureau had so little familiarity with gay life in Miami.) Soon after Versace’s death, the police interrogate D’Amico about their sex life, convinced this “deviance” must be involved in the murder. Cunanan’s four gay victims face the bigotry of strangers, their families, their colleagues, and the armed services before they are killed by Cunanan, a gay man who is shielded from law enforcement by the very community he is victimizing.

True crime tends to do a disservice to the victims, who are not as freakishly singular as their killers, and that is the case even in Assassination, when one of the victims is a famous man whose name is in the title. Versace is held up as Cunanan’s virtuous mirror image, an agent of life and love, while Cunanan is only an agent of death and destruction. Superficially the two are similar—bright, energetic, engaging—but Versace has values, he embraced hard work and family, he survived AIDS and bigotry, he wears his heart and soul, almost literally, on a sleeve. Cunanan is only ever a hollow pretender. Ramírez is extremely warm and appealing in the role, but it is hard to play a saint. Cunanan’s other victims are more intriguing and heart-wrenching because they are permitted their flaws. There is the closeted, older Chicago businessman Lee Miglin (Mike Farrell); a former naval officer and Cunanan’s onetime best friend Jeff Trail (Finn Wittrock, far better here than he has ever been in American Horror Story); and the sweet architect David Madson (Cody Fern).

In fiction, serial killers are usually presented to audiences in the context of crime solving, which gives our interest in them a wholesome cover: Law enforcement wants to know everything about psychopaths because it wants to stop them. We, sitting at home, have no such excuse, but we can hide out in these altruistic motives. But there is little to no law enforcement in Assassination, and we are left only with our fascination, which feels as sordid and voyeuristic as it does warranted. How did Andrew Cunanan become Andrew Cunanan? Insofar as it can, the series tries to answer this question, but there will always be something unsatisfactory in doing so: There is no serial killer math. Some mysterious factors are always part of the equation. As the show works its way backward through time, it inevitably feels like it is building toward an ur-trauma that set Cunanan on his monstrous path—even as we have already watched dozens of moments when he could have veered off it

The Assassination of Gianni Versace does not justify Cunanan—he is, always, self-pitying and lazy, unwilling to choose a better course—but it does more than simply try to comprehend him. Occasionally it has compassion for him. Cunanan once shoved his mother so hard he dislocated her shoulder, and in Orth’s book the circumstances seem starkly brutal: In the show, it seems more understandable. There’s a scene, midway through the season, after Cunanan has committed his first murder, but when he is holding his shell-shocked second victim nearly hostage, when he breaks down into sobs while listening to a singer in a bar (Aimee Mann, making a cameo). Criss, is brilliant, fully self-pitying, the loneliest, saddest psycho in America. In this moment, Cunanan is not a stranger to recognizable human feelings: He wants to be loved, he wants a do-over, he wants not to have ruined his life—which is not the same as feeling remorse. The moment is an icky proffer, much like the show itself: It’s provocative, uncomfortable, morally complex. It’s good, but it doesn’t feel good.

Throughout the series, and apparently in life, Cunanan said that he just wanted to be remembered. (Further evidence that the truth is blunter than fiction, Cunanan was selected “Most likely to be remembered” in his high school year book. His quote in the same yearbook was “Après moi, le déluge.”) There is something deeply unsettling and ethically knotty that, with this deeply unsettling, ethically knotty show, he is getting more of what he wished for.

The Assassination of Gianni Versace Makes a Killer the Star