The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story

“The Assassination of Gianni Versace” is more personal and heartfelt than Murphy’s “The People v. O.J. Simpson,” and proves that when it comes to seductive allure laced with menace, no one in TV is Murphy’s match.

“Versace" is not perfect--some episodes meander a bit and anytime the story takes viewers back to Versace and away from the other victims, it becomes less compelling--but it marks an early, strong entry for one of the best series of 2018.

The Assassination of Gianni Versace hangs together imperfectly, and its lines don’t quite flow with the level of unified elegance of its predecessor. Calling to mind the designer’s signature medallion, it is its own Medusa, beauty and horror in one long, complicated gaze. It doesn’t match its predecessor’s power to transfix the audience, but it is definitely worth seeing.

The series is defined by an unsettling unreality that evokes the morbid interest that surrounded these events in real time. With its dogged adherence to authenticity, it creates the feeling of witnessing something illicit, suggesting that we're complicit in fulfilling Cunanan's quest to make an impression, by opting to relive his spree at all.

The show is clearly hoping that audiences will share that stereotypically Italian trait as it channels Federico Fellini and The Godfather. Murphy is more of a workman than a high artist, though, and his meanderings here muddle an intrinsically strange, socially resonant story.

If you can view Cunanan not as the protagonist of Assassination, but its connective tissue, then it begins to feel more satisfying as a series of tragic vignettes about what it was like to be gay in America in the ’90s. ... But Cunanan’s just not interesting enough to support so much screen time, especially because we don’t really get to understand what makes him tick until the story’s nearly over. And even then, it’s hard to find empathy, given what we know about all the horror he inflicted.

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.