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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Review: ‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace’ Is Fashionable, but Flat

At some point we’ll all have to grapple with the idea that the warped compassion of the modern true-crime boom implicates its audience and that viewers are greedily lining up to be part of a lurid long tail of suffering and despair. If “The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story” were a little more interesting, maybe it would be that lightning rod. But instead it’s a surprisingly inert, if lushly imagined, tale.

Ryan Murphy, the show’s executive producer and the director of the first episode, broke out with “Nip/Tuck,” a daring plastic-surgery soap. With its Miami setting and toxic superficiality, it is the most direct antecedent to “The Assassination of Gianni Versace,” more than other creations from Mr. Murphy like “Glee,” “American Horror Story,” “Feud” and even “The People v. O.J. Simpson,” the widely acclaimed first “American Crime Story” installment.

“Tell me what you don’t like about yourself,” the glitzy “Nip/Tuck” surgeons would say to potential patients. That’s the undercurrent here, too. Self-loathing abounds, as “Assassination” repeatedly depicts the psychological effects of internalized homophobia and the miserable spiritual contortions required to stay closeted. In one particularly upsetting scene, a panicked Navy sailor is shown trying gouge off his own tattoo, lest he be outed during the “don’t ask, don’t tell” era. (Straight women get their own brands of insecurity, too, though they exist here as illuminating harmony, not story-driving melody.)

Darren Criss, best known as Blaine on “Glee,” stars as Andrew Cunanan, the spree killer who murdered Mr. Versace and four other men in 1997, before also shooting and killing himself. The mini-series is only occasionally about Mr. Versace (Edgar Ramírez) and is instead something of a biopic about Mr. Cunanan, though it bounces between their stories.

As the series reminds us many times, Mr. Cunanan wanted to be perceived as special. (“Being a part of something special makes you special, right?” Actually, that’s Rachel Berry on the pilot of “Glee.”). Mr. Criss is impressive and haunting as the mediocre con man and murderer, but “Assassination” is never quite sure what to make of its central figure, his narcissism or, perhaps, his sociopathy. FX made eight of the nine episodes available to critics, and in those episodes, the show neglects to crack its own case: Like many people, Mr. Cunanan (at least, the fictionalized version of him depicted here) was a habitual liar, a social climber and someone obsessed with fame and luxury. Unlike almost everyone else, though, he killed people.

Because the show doesn’t have a substantive exploration of why, exactly, Mr. Cunanan became a murderer, it toys with the when and the how of it all, primarily by introducing an often-confusing timeline. Each episode primarily takes place chronologically before the last, so the show largely moves backward. But this winds up being more obfuscating than illuminating.

The labored timeline is not helped by the equally labored dialogue. In an early episode, Andrew gushes about his obsession with Mr. Versace, who he claimed had been a romantic partner. Mr. Versace is “the man I could have been,” he says. “Been with,” his friend corrects. In a later episode, Andrew’s enraged mother asks if he’s drunk. “Drunk on dreams!” he shouts back. “Dreams?” she snaps. “What dreams?”

Other elements fare better, namely Judith Light as Marilyn Miglin, a Home Shopping Network maven whose husband, the Chicago real estate developer Lee Miglin, was one of Mr. Cunanan’s victims. In the throes of tightly wound grief, she explains the advice her husband had given her that made her a cosmetics mogul: “Just think of that little red light as the man you love.”

It’s what every character on the show is doing in some capacity, pretending to love or to portray love, trying to sell an image of beauty, perfection, desirability through a combination of adoration and sexual charisma. Whether that’s what any of the actual people did, though, is unclear.

The series is based on “Vulgar Favors ” by Maureen Orth, a book whose contents the Versace family have disputed. They also said in a statement that “this TV series should only be considered as a work of fiction.” While many outrageous-seeming details in the show are indeed factual (say, Mr. Cunanan’s open-shirted yearbook photo), other scenes are narrative composites or take place between people who are now dead.

This is neither a documentary, nor a deposition, and its responsibility may be to just be true enough. But there’s something tragic and unfair about becoming a spectacle in death, especially in a spectacle that’s more about a murderer than any of his victims. Not everyone in this story wanted to be famous.

Review: ‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace’ Is Fashionable, but Flat

There’s Not That Much Fashion in FX’s Big Versace Drama

LOS ANGELES — Has fashion’s big moment on television finally arrived with the docudrama “The Assassination of Gianni Versace,” the long-awaited installment of “American Crime Story” that begins airing on Wednesday on FX?

Not exactly.

This show centers not on Mr. Versace, the storied Italian designer fatally shot on his doorstep in Miami at age 50 on July 15, 1997, but on his killer, Andrew Cunanan, whose three-month murder spree culminated in his suicide at 27 a week later, leaving any motive a mystery. Mr. Versace doesn’t even appear in some episodes. Much of the season is told backward, beginning with the murder, and then working through Mr. Cunanan’s origin story, going back to his childhood.

It’s grittier and bloodier than its predecessor, “The People vs. O.J. Simpson,” which skipped the two gruesome murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman and focused instead on the madcap trial that followed, setting ratings records for FX and winning Emmys and Golden Globes aplenty.

“We knew we didn’t want to do ‘O.J.’-lite,” said Brad Simpson, an executive producer of the series. “We didn’t want to have the exact same tone or vibe because we felt like that’s something we couldn’t match. This is much more about crime.”

“‘O.J.’ was very frenetic,” said Ryan Murphy, another executive producer. “‘Versace’ is lot slower and grander in its compositions. That’s one of the turn-ons of the show for me. Every season, we’re going to take on a crime, we’re going to look at broader social issues, and every season will have a different tone.”

This one is two-toned. There is the color of Mr. Versace (Edgar Ramirez), whose over-the-top sensibility brought celebrities to the front row, and who helped nurture his younger sister, Donatella (Penélope Cruz), into a star in her own right. In the series, life is getting better for Mr. Versace before his death: His fashion house is about to go public; he is out and proud, rare for high-profile gay men at the time; and though he is H.I.V. positive, new medication is making him stronger.

Then there is the darkness of Mr. Cunanan (Darren Criss), who had a taste for the high life but appears to have made few earnest efforts to get there. The series focuses on his hideous unraveling from social climber to killer. In all, he murdered five people, including two friends, and at least three, and possibly four, gay men.

Much of the series is based on “Vulgar Favors,” Maureen Orth’s 1999 book about Mr. Cunanan, from which the Versace family has distanced itself. “The Versace family has neither authorized nor had any involvement whatsoever in the forthcoming TV series about Mr. Gianni Versace,” the fashion label said in a statement last week. “Since Versace did not authorize the book on which it is partly based nor has it taken part in the writing of the screenplay, this TV series should only be considered as a work of fiction.”

Regardless of its genre, ratings estimates indicate that roughly half the audience that tuned into “The People vs. O.J. Simpson” will not return for this season, said John Landgraf, the chief executive of FX, and he’s just fine with that.

“We’ve made a show that by definition that a gay man that’s lived through this experience is going to have a richer, deeper connection to this material than a straight guy who lived through that period of time,” Mr. Landgraf said. “That’s probably not the most commercial choice you could make in America, but the way you get to great television is to ask people to go into experiences that are compelling but that are challenging.”

Such experimentation makes FX an appealing line item on the slate of properties that the Walt Disney Company is looking to buy from 21st Century Fox, in a deal that will depend on regulatory approval. Mr. Murphy, a hitmaker whose contract expires later this year, has said he is not sure if he will stay with Fox after the Disney sale.

He said he was inspired to do the show because he was living in Los Angeles at the time and gay men in all major national metropolises were transfixed by the story, and terrified Mr. Cunanan would be arriving in their city next. But when Mr. Murphy proposed a season about Mr. Cunanan three years ago — well before the Simpson series debuted — it gave his colleagues pause.

Nina Jacobson, a producer of the series, politely nodded along before she went home to Google the killer. “I was pretty much in the dark,” she said. Brad Simpson, another producer, had a dim memory, too, and wondered if there was “enough meat on the bone.”

Compared with the abundance of coverage around the O.J. Simpson case (tons of books, boundless archives of material), the public’s fascination with Mr. Cunanan’s murder spree was faded like a pair of acid-washed jeans.

But the producers saw bigger themes in Ms. Orth’s book. If Mr. Simpson’s trial touched on racism and sexism, the Cunanan tale connected to something else: the shame of the closet, the remarkable difficulty of being openly gay in the 1990s.

“‘American Crime Story’ at its core only works if you’re telling a bigger story about a societal ill,” Mr. Murphy said. “So I thought, ‘Can we do something on homophobia in the ’90s and the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policies at the time that I think and ruined so many lives?’ And it’s more topical than ever now with this president who is all about discrimination and exclusion.”

Ricky Martin, who plays Mr. Versace’s longtime lover Antonio D’Amico, was himself in the closet in 1997. During multiple time jumps in the series, Antonio is presented as both devoted lover when Mr. Versace was in the closet, and then devoted and even happier lover after he came out.

Mr. Martin said that his performance was informed by two things: just how much better it is to be proudly out now, and the embarrassment that he felt considering how he treated his former partners while he kept his sexuality secret.

“I went back to my life and what my life was in the ’90s: big closet,” he said. “I made my lovers be like Antonio where he was kept in the shadows and kept in the dark back in the ’90s. It took me back to a place, where, see, it was not necessary. I go back to Harvey Milk where he said everyone has to come out and we have to normalize this. So for me, I was playing both roles. I was playing the man coming out and the relief of it, and the lover, the victim.”

It wasn’t hard for Mr. Murphy to secure Mr. Martin’s participation.

“I used to live in Miami when the actual crime happened,” Mr. Martin said. “Although I never met Gianni personally, I was invited to that house many, many times. And for some reason I never went. I had a Giorgio Armani campaign back in the day, so I’m sure that didn’t help!”

Never one to miss a red-carpet opportunity, the house of Armani last week blasted out a news release announcing that it had dressed Mr. Martin, Mr. Criss and Finn Wittrock, the actor who plays one of the Cunanan victims, for the Los Angeles premiere of “The Assassination of Gianni Versace.”

Ms. Cruz chose a Stella McCartney dress for the premiere. A 2009 Academy Award winner for her performance in “Vicky Cristina Barcelona,” she called Donatella Versace, with whom she had come into contact “here and there” over the years, after being cast.

“She said to me, ‘If somebody is doing this and play me, I’m happy that it’s you,’” Ms. Cruz said. “We spoke for one hour. It was a very good conversation.” (Ms. Versace did make one request of the producers, which was granted: that neither of her two children be portrayed in the series.)

Ms. Cruz said she watched hundreds of hours of tape of Ms. Versace to master her Italian accent and mannerisms, and that her portrayal was intended to be one of “respect and love.”

And she said that early last week, Ms. Versace sent her flowers and that the two have been texting like middle-schoolers.

As for Mr. Ramirez, he found access to his character through compassion for the intense scrutiny Mr. Versace faced post-mortem. Mr. Versace “was killed twice,” he said. “He was killed physically, and he was killed so to speak morally and socially.”

The show’s main accomplishment, according to Mr. Ramirez? “I think it’s the redemption of Gianni Versace.”

There’s Not That Much Fashion in FX’s Big Versace Drama

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[HQ] Darren Criss Plays the Happy-Go-Lucky Killer in the Versace TV Drama

Darren Criss Plays the Happy-Go-Lucky Killer in the Versace TV Drama

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Miami — At 6:30 in the morning, Darren Criss was bright-eyed and perky as he bounded out of his South Beach hotel and into a black car. It was the last day of shooting for “The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story,” Ryan Murphy’s nine-episode follow-up to “The People v. O. J. Simpson.”

Mr. Criss plays the assassin and, the night before, he had been up late shooting a manhunt scene that blocked off a stretch of Collins Avenue, to the chagrin of nightclubbers and Uber drivers.

“That was a very cool rock-star moment,” Mr. Criss said in the car, wearing a ball cap and jeans. He flashed an easygoing grin, the kind that endeared him to legions of young fans of “Glee,” on which he played Blaine Anderson, the preppy, harmonizing love interest of Chris Colfer’s Kurt Hummel.

His new role on “American Crime Story” (which has its premiere on FX on Jan. 17) couldn’t be less gleeful: Andrew Cunanan, the gay gigolo turned serial killer who shot Mr. Versace in 1997, after killing four other men.

Mr. Criss, 30, leaned over and pointed out the window. “See that?” he said. “That’s the houseboat, perfectly recreated.” In Indian Creek, the crew had built a replica of Mr. Cunanan’s final hide-out, where he met his demise after a frenzied eight-day manhunt. The series makes use of several real locations in Miami Beach, most notably the Versace Mansion, the site of the murder, now a boutique hotel.

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Darren Criss Plays the Happy-Go-Lucky Killer in the Versace TV Drama

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TV: ‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace’

Jan. 17; fxnetworks.com.

On July 15, 1997, the designer Gianni Versace was gunned down on the steps of his Miami Beach mansion, leaving the fashion world to mourn one of its most luminous stars. Eight days later his murderer, Andrew Cunanan, turned his gun on himself.

Starting Wednesday, Jan. 17, on FX, “The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story” will speculate on what motivated the monstrously bright and pathological Cunanan, a social-climbing gay gigolo, to kill at least five men, including Versace. It’s the anthology’s second installment, after 2016’s Emmy-sweeping “The People v. O.J. Simpson.”

The Venezuelan actor Edgar Ramírez portrays a benevolent Versace; Penélope Cruz sweeps in as his sister and muse, Donatella, showing scant mercy to his grieving partner, played by Ricky Martin. And Darren Criss (“Glee”) coolly seethes — until he viciously erupts — as Cunanan. The nine episodes, volleying between the dazzling, sexed-up opulence of Versace’s existence and the grimy despair of Cunanan’s, are adapted from Maureen Orth’s 1999 book, “Vulgar Favors,” which examines the role that homophobia may have played in the hunt for the serial killer. KATHRYN SHATTUCK

Your Week in Culture: Lana Del Rey, ‘Gianni Versace,’ the Murder of Malcolm X Onstage

Judy Becker on the set of “The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story,” which marks her second collaboration with director Ryan Murphy.