It’s also the title of a new Cinemax drama series, the second show this spring to follow a serial killer case reverse-chronologically. Had Cinemax been able to premiere Rellik timed to its initial launch on BBC One last fall, it would have looked like the tricky progenitor and Tom Rob Smith’s work on The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story might have looked like an imitator, but instead American audiences are getting this one reverse-chronologically.
Actually, being able to watch Rellik and The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story basically back-to-back is an illuminating look at the advantages and disadvantages of storytellers creating obstacles for themselves in constructing otherwise familiar genre stories. Rellik creators Harry and Jack Williams are no strangers to experimenting with formal complications after The Missing and Liar and they commit much more thoroughly and much more intriguingly to the Memento-like structure over the first five episodes of their six-episode drama. It’s novelist Smith, however, who found a way to make a gimmick structure pay off in terms of character development (even if he just made Andrew Cunnan into a half-Filipino Tom Ripley), while Rellik sells out its gimmick entirely with a finale that’s an exercise only in exposition and flimsy psychological motivation.
[…] What shows like Rellik and The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story are doing is acknowledging the entrenchment of crime investigation structure developed over decades of TV procedurals. The extra step that Gianni Versace only sometimes took and that Rellik rarely takes is progressing beyond cleverness into narrative rewards. The title itself reflects a series with an “Aren’t we cute?” indulgence that doesn’t deepen after you’ve said, “Yeah, I get it.”
The charts below reflect how THR’s awards columnist Scott Feinberg believes the Emmy standings would look if voting ended today. They are formulated using a combination of personal impressions (from sampling many programs), historical considerations (how other shows with similar pedigrees have resonated), precursor awards (some groups have historically correlated with the TV Academy more than others) and consultations with industry insiders (including voters, content creators, awards strategists and fellow members of the press).
[…] One of the things that became clear to him during this process is that he doesn’t want to be “just a showrunner” anymore. “It’s just not interesting for me to sit in a room for eight hours a day with my mind as a sieve pouring out ideas,” he says. Nor is he interested in waking up to a daily ratings report card. “I felt that frustration even with [The Assassination of Gianni] Versace, which I think is one of the best things I’ve ever done, but you couldn’t win because it’s like, ‘Well, it’s no O.J.,’” he says, referring to the first installment of American Crime Story, which smashed ratings records for FX and cleaned up on the awards circuit. “So, the Netflix way is an interesting way because it’s a purely creativity way. It is simply ‘Your show is doing great’ or ‘Your show is not doing so great.’ That’s it. It’s not a humiliating ‘Your show is down 30 percent.’”
But for me, there’s a lot more exciting programming where nostalgia is kept at arm’s reach. In fact, a slew of contemporary series set in the ‘90s — only one of which, incidentally, features a white male protagonist — have proved much better at scratching that scrunchies-and-flannel itch while recalling the Clinton era for what it was. Netflix’s teen dramedy Everything Sucks! initially feels like a ride in a time machine — no other show captures the clothes and lingo of the ’90s so precisely — but the show features a budding black filmmaker and a teenage lesbian as its dual protagonists. That’s also true of the most recent season of American Crime Story, which explores in part the anti-gay sentiment that enabled Gianni Versace killer Andrew Cunanan’s murder spree. The previous season of ACS, The People v. O.J. Simpson, similarly used hindsight to illuminate how race and gender dynamics warped “the trial of the century.” And the 2015 HBO miniseries Show Me a Hero, about an anti-desegregation effort in Yonkers and set between 1987 and 1994, evinces no nostalgia at all, and is all the more powerful for its firm unsentimentality.
While the weeks after the premiere of FX’s The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story illustrated the path that took Andrew Cunanan (Darren Criss) on a killing spree across the U.S., Wednesday’s season finale returned to the death of the famed fashion designer and the aftermath of his murder as Cunanan spent his frantic final days before killing himself on a Miami houseboat.
The episode brought back many of the series’ all-star guest roster — Judith Light as widow Marilyn Miglin, Max Greenfield as Cunanan’s junkie friend Ronnie, Annaleigh Ashford as Cunanan’s oldest friend Elizabeth Cote, Jon Jon Briones and Joanna P. Adler as Cunanan’s parents — to show how all of the series’ major players were coping with Cunanan’s crimes.
Miglin, on business in nearby Tampa, was hoping her husband’s killer would be caught. Adler’s Mary Ann was dumbstruck that her son was responsible for such heinous crimes, Cote pleaded for the return of her kind-hearted friend, and Briones’ Modesto, whom Cunanan called in a desperate haze after realizing he wouldn’t be able to escape the cops, told his son he’d help him but then gave an interview on the news about a potential movie instead.
Much of the hour-plus episode featured Cunanan becoming increasingly more emotional and hopeless as he took shelter in a houseboat, watching Gianni’s (Edgar Ramirez) Italian funeral on television and reminiscing about his time with the designer. “What if you had a dream your whole life that you were special, but no one believed it,” Cunanan asked. Versace responded that it wasn’t about potential, it was about following through.
Penelope Cruz and Ricky Martin returned as Versace’s grieving sister, Donatella, and partner, Antonio D’Amico, respectively, for emotional scenes coming to terms with Versace’s death. And, after Cunanan ultimately shot himself, a final scene juxtaposing Cunanan’s unremarkable final resting place and lack of mourners with Versace’s opulent mausoleum and Donatella’s palpable grief.
For viewers surprised that Versace himself was present in so few of the series’ nine episodes, writer Tom Rob Smith tells The Hollywood Reporter that it was not his intention to tell Versace’s story.
“We were upfront about the source material,” he explains. “We were never doing a biopic of Versace, because that’s this amazing success story. We were always doing a crime story, and the crime story is Cunanan. And what is interesting in relation to the crime story is the symbolism of Versace. What he represents, how he overcame everything that Andrew failed to overcome: homophobia and relative poverty. All the things that made Versace a success compared to things that made Cunanan destructive.”
The finale, Smith explains, is “bringing together all of these people that were destroyed and damaged by Andrew, and really exploring what it is to lose someone. I think this is one of the few stories where the victim’s loss is at the center of this piece — this hole that was created by Andrew.”
While Cunanan’s final moments were largely fictional, since the killer was holed up in Miami alone, Criss tells THR that he first thought that Cunanan’s suicide was largely an act of desperation. But after speaking with Smith about it, he realized that the decision was very deliberate.
“This is a guy who could have gone to court,” Criss says.“He could have stretched it out forever. He could have been Charles Manson. If he was looking for fame and notoriety then he could have stuck with that. He could have been incarcerated and continued to be on magazines for the rest of his life.
He adds, "This is a guy who has curated his entire life’s story very specifically, to the T. His backstory, what his parents did. Different people knew different versions of him because he was very specific of how his image would appear and what his story was. So I think he must have come to a point where he realized that if he was incarcerated, that narrative was taken away from him and the only way to control or almost canonize his notoriety and infamy would be to take his own life.”
The season also touched on the internalized homophobia within law enforcement at the time that potentially hindered the investigation of Cunanan’s other murders before Versace — David Madson, Jeff Trail, Lee Miglin, William Reese — but Smith tells THR the way the homophobia affected Cunanan was also incredibly destructive.
“Ultimately the homophobia, I think, is much more about Andrew’s homophobia — the way it beat him as a person and the way he soaked up everything, rather than it just being a personified police officer doing it,” he says.
But the juxtaposition between the two men from similar backgrounds who grew up to do vastly different things with their latent potential is what the finale ultimately drove home.
“You can’t just say Andrew was beaten by society. Other people overcame the things that he didn’t,” Smith says. “You’re contrasting, I think, two very different people who have many similarities in the beginning and why one person was full of love and created so much — Versace and this genius — with one person who became such a monster. That, to me, is one of the central shapes of the story.”
After a buzzed-about turn on FX’s The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story and her long-running role in Amazon’s Transparent, what better move for the Who’s the Boss? matriarch than a role on another of TV’s standout series?
Before the midpoint of FX’s The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story, the narrative of serial killer Andrew Cunanan’s life has been told in reverse chronological order and devoted episodes to each of the murderer’s victims. But the fifth episode, titled “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell,” lives up to the promise creator Ryan Murphy made to shed a light on institutionalized homophobia in the 1990s, juxtaposing the coming out stories of two of Cunanan’s victims with the moment the killer unravels.
Darren Criss, who plays Cunanan, spoke with The Hollywood Reporter about the pivotal episode, and how it helps fuse the past few episodes of the series — which have focused on Cunanan’s victims Lee Miglin, David Madson, Jeffrey Trail and William Reese — back with the titular fashion designer. “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” follows the struggle of military man Jeff Trail to come to terms with his own sexuality while Versace toys with the idea of publicly revealing his own relationship status. Their two very different experiences — one leading to Trail’s discharge from the service and the other leading to a high-profile piece in a national magazine — are both in conflict with Cunanan’s own spiral about his own identity and self-worth.
“At this point in the series you haven’t seen a lot from the Versaces, and so it’s nice to be juxtaposing someone like Jeff’s coming out story against Gianni coming out with The Advocate,” Criss tells THR. “Two different worlds are trying to face the same obstacles and being met with very different resistance is really interesting because you can see this very harrowing world that Jeff is in constant conflict with versus this very … glamorous side of the coin, which would be Gianni’s side. There’s a real heroism to both.”
Below, Criss discusses the series’ unique structure, building Cunanan’s back story and the lack of Versace in the series.
It’s interesting to see Andrew there for Jeff when he needs help accepting his identity as a gay man, but Andrew’s entire trip to Minneapolis to see David and Jeff is a cry for help and he won’t accept any from either of them.
Andrew has this savior complex, which is why I think he really thrived so much in a place as complex as San Diego in the ‘90s because you have a vibrant gay scene right on top of the vibrant military town. So it’s sort of built-in conflict within a lot of young men who Andrew meets. Andrew stands for everything that these men would find attractive — not in a sexual sense but in a personality and joie de vive sense, the guy that is now offering refuge and a place to celebrate what would otherwise be a source of conflict for them. It was a feeding ground for someone like Andrew to feel needed in a really fulfilling way.
[Andrew] has many tragedies, but one of his biggest tragedies is that I think he needs to be the purveyor of everything. He needs to be in control. He has to be the one that is buying the drinks, throwing the parties, introducing people. He needs to be the one that is giving the help, and as a result I think his output is so high that nothing goes in. And so his own help system, as far as gaining help, is manifested by only being able to help others. He just gives himself away to so many people to the point where he can sort of cover up his own shortcomings by being this constant giver.
Finding somebody like Jeff is sort of the gold mine Andrew gravitated toward. Even though he was really helping out Jeff — and he really does in a very earnest, beautiful way, I think — Jeff was also unconsciously there to help Andrew, just to give him some kind of purpose because he needed to feel love. So their meeting was very tragic.
Watching this episode from the perspective of someone who might not have really understood the nuances of the “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” military policy at the time, what can you say about how the episode might have enlightened you?
Even if you are of an age where this is something that you were aware of, unless you were gay and in the military at the time, I feel like there’s no way you’d have the same insight or experience as somebody like Jeff or his peers. You really can’t have a shot at working with what that actually means on a day-to-day basis. It’s a continuing question and struggle for our brothers and sisters in arms and people who serve our country. I think maybe hearing the specifics of Jeff’s particular story hopefully will make this more accessible to people and seem a little more real, and seeing the real struggle that it presents for a lot of young men and women.
Although the story is being told in reverse, the first four episodes have a very clear structure. This episode played with time a bit differently — what was filming it like?
Luckily and very thankfully, to the credit of Dan Minehan, who directed both four and five, we did something that I hadn’t done in a very long time, and it’s something that actors really thirst for — we had a table reading. We actually read through both episodes in chronological order, and we shot in chronological order as much as possible, those two episodes together, which is really an absurd luxury. I was thrilled that they took the diligence to really try and execute this in a more linear way. So, in that sense, it made these very much a two-parter. I watched two episodes together, so I actually would be curious to see how people experience it, having had a week or so in between. It’s a really interesting structure. Some people seem to take to it, others really don’t like it because there’s less of, I guess, a payoff — or it’s an inverse payoff, because you already made your decisions about the person.
Shooting out of sequence, to me, just means I get to have this kind of CSI map emotional trajectory on my wall and I have to kind of play emotion Tetris as far as what fits where, in order to get what yields this to get this. And how does point A have to connect to point B? I’m still curious because I still haven’t seen the very last episode. To me, that’s where it all comes together again.
In the next three episodes that you have seen, what did you learn about Andrew and what are you looking forward to audiences learning about him?
I was always interested in Andrew’s life as a teenager because it’s always easier to identify with a young person that has so much more time to go. I think, inevitably, when you know somebody has done something as terrible as Andrew did, you connect every moment of their life to those actions. Any little thing he did in high school, “Well that’s, you know…” Now you look at it differently because you know that they’ve committed murder. It’s interesting in looking at really gifted, young, talented kid and just really exploring how fun and charming he was. A lot of the grim atmosphere that he was breathing in towards the latter part of his life, I really, really wanted to make sure that we couldn’t connect that dot to the dots of his youth.
We shot a lot of stuff that I thought was really fun and showed just an honest-to-goodness, lovable teenager. I don’t know if that all made it into the show, but I remember those scenes and I really enjoyed being able to paint those colors of Andrew. I had to wait the entire shoot to be able to finally show these more affable colors. Earlier in the season where we know what he’s done, there’s sinister undertones of even his happier moments because we’re closer to the famous murders. We can’t help but question everything he’s doing. I couldn’t wait to get him as a teenager because I really wanted to confuse people’s senses of who and what you’re rooting for.
That was the first chance to really embrace the best parts of someone’s life … you may have not liked him, but you couldn’t say that he wasn’t the life of the party. [A high school classmate of Cunanan’s told Criss], “I just want you to know that Andrew was such a good friend. We really loved him. He was so much fun and he was just someone you could count on.” She said it with such — it was so heartbreaking to hear because you could tell the tone was totally mortified when she read the news 10, 15 years after the fact.
That’s the person that I was really hoping to create and that’s what makes this structure interesting. It’s like Merrily We Roll Along. You start with them at their worst, and how do you feel about them when you see them at their best? It’s pretty divisive. It’s either going to make you really mad, or its just going break your heart that there was such a loss of potential there. The memorable parts for me was just showing a kid that’s just trying to figure out his life like every other kid.
The end of this “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” episode saw Andrew and Jeff fighting about honor, which really seemed to be what set Andrew off on his killing spree.
I was speaking earlier about the metaphorical mapping out of Andrew, and as far as the big red circles, with the red pins on ‘em, that moment is a huge one. That comes back to a question a lot of people have who don’t know the story and this case very well: “What happened between San Diego and Minneapolis? What triggered Andrew to go AWOL? What happened between the two of them? They were inseparable.” Something must’ve happened between them for him to go to Minneapolis and carry out this action that you can’t help but assume is planned.
That’s a big question mark for a lot of people. We will never know what happened, and our show could never dare to say that this is truth by any means. But for our storytelling sake, it’s not necessarily about what really happened so much as it’s about the emotional arcs that had to have happened in order for these things take place. So in our case, we have this scene where there is a cathartic laying of cards on the table, where the ethos of both characters is kind of put on the line. You have, basically, Jeff calling Andrew out. Not too dissimilar from what had happened in the last episode, where the thing that set Andrew off on David was him finally calling him out for what he was and basically making Andrew live inside a world that is real and therefore not very pretty.
Any time Andrew forced to be exposed to the real world around him or the truth, it’s a very unpleasant thing for him. So that set him off in the last episode, and ultimately ended with a fight in the car and very rageful homicide. That was the second of the murders. So the first one — “no one wants your love” is the line that Jeff says. And that’s enough to turn a cog in Andrew’s brain. To hear that from the one person that he’s given everything to, you can’t help but feel bad for the guy, even though hopefully most people wouldn’t do what he did.
He’s giving so much of himself to people that they now have to feel beholden to holding him up. And so it’s sort of emotional hostage — you’re now feeling entitled to someone’s life because you’ve given them something that they didn’t ever really ask for. That’s a pretty big awakening point, for Jeff to realize that this guy is unconsciously using him. And he calls that out, the truth that Andrew’s not ready or emotionally prepared to hear or deal with. And if he can’t have something, he has to take it, and he has to destroy it.
He couldn’t have Jeff; he couldn’t have David; so he had to literally take it. He couldn’t have Versace’s fame, success, everything, so he to take it. Even to take someone’s car. So when Andrew is deprived something, the ultimate way to really take it back and be in control is to be more powerful, and to be the controller of that person’s life.
Andrew Cunanan began his killing spree in early 1997, when he murdered his friends David Madson and Jeffrey Trail. The two men take center stage in the fourth and fifth episodes of FX’s The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story, which detail Trail and Madson’s slayings, deaths that happened months before Cunanan gunned down fashion designer Gianni Versace on the front steps of his Miami mansion.
Screenwriter Tom Rob Smith, who penned every episode of the FX anthology’s second season, said he structured the season to juxtapose the similarities and differences between Cunanan (Darren Criss) and Versace (Edgar Ramirez), and how both men dealt with societal homophobia in extremely different ways. One thrived as a fashion designer, the other turned into a conartist/serial killer.
“If you look at the crimes themselves, they express various facets of homophobia. They’re very different,” Smith told The Hollywood Reporter. “You have the murder of Jeff, which is clearly about someone who should have had this brilliant military career. He was the perfect soldier, utterly dedicated, and Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell was just such a travesty. You have people who went to give their lives for their country and to say to them, ‘We don’t want your life.’ Or, ‘Your life is meaningless to us.’ It seems to me irrational and cruel, and it destroys people. [Next week’s DADT episode] is about how he was killed in a way before he was killed. In this sense that the real killer of Jeff was that policy.”
He continued, “And then you have a very different facet of homophobia with the second victim, David. You had this brilliant young man caught up in a murder, and so ashamed of who he is that he just can’t say to Andrew, ‘I need to go to the police now.’ Why doesn’t he break from that guy much sooner? It’s because he just knows, ‘If I go to the police, they won’t believe me.’ That’s heartbreaking.”
Cody Fern, who plays Madson, said his character struggled with an internalized shame that prevented him from standing his ground against Cunanan.
“David is dealing with the shame of what he’s been carrying around, having hidden, and ultimately feeling like maybe he’s complicit in Jeff’s death,” Fern told THR. “Is that something to do with that thing that’s inside of him that society finds ugly, particularly at that time?”
In next week’s “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” episode, Trail’s backstory is told through the lens of his military service, and juxtaposed with Versace’s public coming out. Finn Wittrock, who plays the Navy veteran, said the fact that his character was a dedicated soldier trying to serve his country makes his story even more heartbreaking.
“He was a young man trying to make some kind of change, but he also just wanted to do his best,” he said. “He really believed in being in the service. He believed in being in the Navy and he actually believed that Don’t Ask Don’t Tell was hurting America.”
The way Trail is portrayed in the series is absolutely true, according to Vulgar Favors author Maureen Orth, who wrote the book on which Smith based his ACS season. The reason Trail left the Navy in real life, however, is different than what the series purports.
“He was a really straight arrow, great guy, and he came from a lovely family, and that’s all very, very true — his background and how much he loved the military,” she said. “But by the time he left the Navy I think he was done with it.”
Although Orth said Cunanan thought Madson was the love of his life, Madson didn’t reciprocate those feelings. And both Madson and Trail were worried about Cunanan’s behavior before their deaths.
“Both Jeff and David began feeling very uneasy, and Andrew was spiraling down into drugs and S&M pornography,” she said. “People didn’t want to be around him, and they were rejecting him. And after he had lavished so much material things on both of them and they never said no, for the most part. He felt very used, I guess.”
Trail was the first person Cunanan killed, and Wittrock told THR he thinks it was a turning point for him.
“I think in some sad way, he was sort of the beginning of the end. I think Andrew had a bit of a fascination with him that wasn’t quite reciprocated from Jeff’s point of view,” the actor said. “This is, of course, me speculating on his character, but then it begins the downward spiral of his psychosis and his mania.”
ACS news 