Traditionally, TV listings are found towards the back of a newspaper. These days, however, anyone wondering what the next hit series will be is better off looking for the most violent item on the front page.
The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story, which premiered in the US this week, is the latest in a seemingly endless new wave of true-crime dramas. Like a recent series of British primetime hits, it taps in to an apparent appetite to relive headline-making cases of the recent past. But unlike our dour docudramas, it does so with unapologetic panache.
It’s a very stylish – and very stylised – account of the serial killer Andrew Cunanan’s life, told in reverse, from his apparently motiveless 1997 murder of the Italian fashion designer Versace back to his troubled early years. The Versace family have branded it “a work of fiction”. It’s a compliment, though they didn’t intend it as one. This anthology series (which last year won nine Emmys and two Golden Globes for its retelling of the O J Simpson trial) puts good storytelling first. American Crime Story’s creator, Ryan Murphy, is also responsible for Glee. His métier is gorgeous, meticulously crafted trash, with a side order of stunt casting: here pop singer Ricky Martin plays Versace’s bereaved boyfriend Antonio.
Given Murphy’s reputation, the emotional depth of American Crime Story has come as a surprise to some critics. But Murphy has never been shallow. Beneath the kitsch, his dramas have always had an understanding of what pop culture can teach us about ourselves. O J Simpson’s trial has taken on different resonances over the decades – as proven by a scene in American Crime Story’s first series, in which OJ’s lawyer Robert Kardashian lectures his daughter Kim on the dark side of fame. Similarly, just as OJ offered interesting observations about race and celebrity, the Versace drama has pertinent things to say about gay identity.
Viewing the past from an ironic distance, Murphy’s bold approach places his true-crime dramas leagues ahead of his British peers’ efforts. The contrast will become unignorable when the show’s second series arrives on BBC Two next month – and, despite all their hand-wringing earnestness, it’s the British shows that feel more exploitative.
One of the big differences is timing: both series of American Crime Story are about events that took place 20 years ago. When a tragedy is too fresh in people’s memories, however, any irreverent, experimental retelling risks accusations of insensitivity. As a result, British filmmakers covering more recent crimes have found themselves hamstrung by convention – but even then, the speed with which they are ready to translate real-life suffering into primetime drama has necessarily felt a bit queasy.
In the space of just four months last year, British viewers suffered through The Moorside (about the 2008 disappearance of Shannon Matthews), Little Boy Blue (about the 2007 murder of 11-year-old Rhys Jones) and Three Girls, broadcast just five years on from the Rochdale sex-trafficking trial that inspired it. (The first two, incidentally, were both written by Jeff Pope, who has become the recognised leader of the genre)
Each show took a similarly down-the-line approach to narrative, and presented the suffering of Northern working-class families in washed-out greys, pushing the audience towards helpless anger at the slow-moving, ineffectual authorities. Each show had similarly doleful performances, earning the same raves from critics. None attempted anything that couldn’t have been achieved better by a documentary.
The other option, of course, is to create dramas that cut straight to the issues, without exploiting real people’s stories to do it. In 2016, the excellent National Treasure – following a fictional Seventies TV star hit by sex abuse allegations – turned the quagmire of Operation Yewtree into art, raising questions a straightforward factual account never could.
But our myopic, ripped-from-the-headlines docudramas are often too close to their subject to offer either documentary insight or dramatic depth.
Nevertheless don’t expect the true-crime trend to abate. Next up from the BBC is The Barking Murders, a three-part drama about the East London rapist and serial killer Stephen Port, who targeted victims on gay dating apps. It will arrive less than two years on from his conviction – let’s hope it is not another case of “too much, too soon”.
Tag: the telegraph
The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story, episode 1 review: a gossipy, killer slice of docudrama
★★★★☆
An aura of decadent fabulousness lingers over The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story. The tragic fashion designer is introduced gliding about in a blinding pink dressing gown in his Versailles-like Miami palace – a riot of stucco and sunshine over which director and show-runner Ryan Murphy overlays sonorous opera.
As if inspired by one of Versace’s swirling creations, Murphy wastes no time ratcheting up the overkill to a clanging crescendo in FX’s true crime follow up to 2016’s The People Vs. OJ Simpson.
Gunned down on his doorstep by the psychotic fabulist Andrew Cunanan (Glee’s Darren Criss), Gianni Versace bleeds to death alongside a bloodied dove similarly, if inexplicably, pierced by a bullet.
Storming on three quarters of the way in as Donatella Versace – Gianni’s beloved sister and heir – Penélope Cruz adds to the excess with a performance as filthily ridiculous as her dirty blonde wig. The most delicious aspect of the series, however, is its element of surprise.
Versace (Édgar Ramírez – whose performance is, weirdly, the most sober here) was a global fashion figure when cut down in July 1997 yet the details of his killing are not widely known.
That’s in contrast to the OJ Simpson case, so embedded in our memories that watching Murphy recreate the events two years ago felt like participating in a game of true crime bingo. The Ford Bronco chase, the misogynistic humbling of Marcia Clark, Johnnie Cochran’s “if glove don’t fit” speech – all were dutifully trotted out, each beat as predictable as the chorus in a Justin Bieber song.
Season two, by contrast, packs a gilded punch. The first episode bounces between the slaying of Versace to his first encounter, in a San Fransisco gay club, with Cunanan. The future killer is a Walter Mitty-like social climber whose life is wallpapered with so many habitual lies it’s unclear whether even he knows truth from fiction. Preppy of manner and soulless of gaze, he gives Murphy something the Simpson case lacked – an unambiguous villain scary even when he isn’t shooting dead international fashion designers.
As Donatella, Cruz meanwhile cuts a furious swathe. She trowels on the accent and affectations quite gleefully: a little thrill is sure to run through you every time she flutters her reptilian eye-lids or pronounces “company” as “kuuumpany” (perhaps unsurprisingly the Versace family have dismissed the series as fantasy).
Even more impressive is pop star Ricky Martin as Gianni’s devastated romantic partner Antonio D’Amico. It’s 1997 in Miami but gay rights are still an evolving concept as made clear when Detective Scrimshaw (Will Chase) casually asks the grieving D’Amico whether, after 15 years together, Versace was paying his lover for services rendered in the bedroom.
Amid the towering chintz and power-house performances, there’s a slight clumsiness to the interweaving of the murder hunt with wrangling over the future of the Versace empire (Donatella wants to delay plans to float the “kuuumpany” on the stock exchange). But the bare facts of the case are so intriguing, the evocation of Nineties Miami so searing, as to paper over the structural clunkiness.
With American Crime Story season two, Murphy has served up another killer slice of documudrama – a lush, gossipy tour de force that dazzles and tantalises in equal measure.
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