Making a follow-up to anything that garners a high level of acclaim is a daunting prospect, especially when the project you're following up is the first season of American Crime Story, The People v. O.J. Simpson. A recreation of the O.J. Simpson murder trial, this was a ten-episode long season that took a trial everyone across the planet knew about and made it feel fresh & new, especially when it explored elements like the pressure put on Marcia Clark during the trial and examining the systemic racism against African-Americans that was affecting the proceedings. Thoughtful, compelling, packed with tremendous performances, this was top-notch television. The only problem for the creators of the show was figuring out where they could go in a subsequent season of American Crime Story that wouldn't feel like a letdown in quality to the average viewer.
This new season of American Crime Story, entitled The Assassination of Gianni Versace, focuses on yet another headline-grabbing 1990's murder trial involving a famous celebrity, specifically the assassination of fashion icon Gianni Versace (Edgar Ramirez) by Andrew Cunanan (Darren Criss). To the surprise of no one, what we get here isn't anywhere near as good as The People v. O.J. Simpson, but happily, The Assassination of Gianni Versace manages to be superb television in it's own special way. Even better, it achieves this level of quality by being a different beast compared to the first season of American Crime Story, this is conciously not a retread of what's already worked.
Most interestingly, The Assassination of Gianni Versace seperates itself from many other TV shows or movies about real-life killers by making the central focus of it's season-long arc not the killer. Instead of glamorizing Andrew Cunanan or going through great pains to paint as him some tragic misunderstood soul, The Assassination of Gianni Versace is actually all about the people Cunanan killed. I'm not just referring to Gianni Versace, though he gets a large amount of time in the spotlight too, no, I'm also referring to the four other people Cunanan killed before he slaughtered Versace. These individuals who were just victims of Cunanan's rampage and eneded up being footnotes in the news coverage of Versace's death, they get to be humanized and fleshed out here so that they can become human beings with attributes beyond just being murder victims.
The show accomplishes this by the unique storytelling twist of depicting the events of Cunanan's life in reverse order, Memento-style. Our first episode covers the Versace murder and from there each episode goes furtehr and further back in time until the ninth episode brings the viewer back to the night after Versace was killed. This allows a number of individual episodes, namely the third, fourth and fifth entries in the season, to be centered almost entirely on folks like Lee Miglin (Mike Farrell), David Madison (Cody Fern) and Jeff Trail (Finn Wittrock), who had entire lives and personal ordeals to grapple with before their existences were cut short by Cunanan. Storylines like Jeff Trail grappling with his identity as a gay man while serving in the U.S. Navy are ones that typically eschew Cunanan for large periods of screentime, letting one get to know characters like Trail in greater detail.
That aforementioned subplot involving Jeff Trail connects to another over-arching element of the season, the way American society tries to erase gay individuals from it's mind altogether. Whether it's through Don't Ask, Don't Tell, FBI agents not taking Cunanan's murder spree as a grave threat due to his victims being gay men or the way the U.S. government handled (or rather, didn't handle) the real-life AIDS epidemic of the 1980's and 1990's, The Assassination of Gianni Versace makes it apparent how so many human beings are left on the wayside of society simply due to their sexuality. Cognizant of this issue and looking to rectify it, the show then devotes storylines dedicated to restoring the humanity to deceased individuals like David Madison and Jeff Trail.
This is a fascinating undercurrent to this season of television that lends it depth beyond just being yet another true-crime show. Also helping The Assassination of Gianni Versace stand out from the pack is it's numerous top-notch performances, most notably Darren Criss as Andrew Cunanan. Constantly coming up with new fictitious backstories and altering his personality at a moment's whim, Criss portrays Cunanan as the human embodiment of a liquid: able to adjust it's shape for whatever it's caught in with no problem. There's a haunting quality to the way Criss depicts a manipulative and detached cheery disposition. Edgar Ramirez is similarly strong as Gianni Versace while Penelope Cruz, playing Donatella Versace, completely disappears into a startlingly riveting performance. The large number of guest stars in the program are uniformly aces, especially Cody Fern (God, his performance in the fourth episode of this season is devastating) and Max Greenfield, the latter of whom is great at turning what could have been a stereotypical character into something deeply human and equally tragic.
There are times towards the end of this season where The Assassination of Gianni Versace certainly finds its reach exceeding its grasp, namely an appearence from Cunanan's father in the season finale that feels a tad too convienent. It's dialogue too runs into trouble of feeling too showy for certain dramatic situations, namely anytime it tries to place some "foreshadowing" dialogue that has characters ironically referencing tragic circumstances that have yet to transpire (i.e. a character we know will die saying "I'm gonna live forever!" or something to that effect). But as a whole, it's an impressively ambitious show that manages to succeed far more often than it stumbles. This is a fantastically realized program that uses a horrific real-life murder as the starting point for an in-depth examination of the human beings society refused to acknowledge as having humanity to speak of.
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