‘ACS Versace’ Never Caught On Like ‘O.J.’, Because It Was After Something Darker

Ryan Murphy’s American Crime Story ended its second season on Wednesday night, bringing with it the conclusion to The Assassination of Gianni Versace. After a season’s worth of reverse chronology, the series snapped back to the aftermath of Versace’s death at the hands of killer Andrew Cunanan, followed his devastated family — including sister Donatella and lover Antonio — as they prepared to bury him, while also portraying the suddenly-urgent manhunt that (eventually) tracked Cunanan to the house boat he’d been hiding out on. Versace’s star studded funeral preceded Cunanan’s self-inflicted end, closing out the series on a rather operatic note.

So, not to paraphrase Aaron Sorkin too intentionally or anything, but: what kind of season has it been? Quantitatively, The Assassination of Gianni Versace has underperformed relative to the 2016 juggernaut The People vs. O.J. Simpson. This is true in both ratings and reviews. O.J. averaged 3.29 million viewers per episode, while Versace has averaged 1.09 mil; O.J. scored a 96 from Rotten Tomatoes and a 90 on Metacritic, while Versace did slightly worse at 86 and 74, respectively. Moreover, you can just feel it in the conversations, or lack thereof, in the media. The People vs. O.J. Simpson was a phenomenon. The nation was going through a national re-experiencing of the Simpson scandal, with a competing documentary on ESPN and countless retrospectives. We followed every cigarette Sarah Paulson lit up as Marcia Clark, remembered every tertiary character as they crossed our screen, and stayed riveted even though we all knew how it would end. That treatment didn’t extend to The Assassination of Gianni Versace, and at least in this viewer’s opinion, it’s not because it was a major drop-off in quality.

Part of it we can chalk up to unavoidable factors. The murder of fashion designer Gianni Versace by serial killer Andrew Cunanan in the summer of 1997 was an infamous piece of tabloid news, but it didn’t come close to approaching the levels of notoriety that the O.J. Simpson trial got. That was a national soap opera that lasted well over a year and incorporated dozens of side characters who we all had tucked away in the recesses of our memories, ready for American Crime Story to unearth them. The Versace murder was not like that. We knew about the victim and the killer, and if you managed to read Maureen Orth’s book Vulgar Favors (upon which Murphy and writer Tom Rob Smith based Versace), you knew about a few more. But there were no Kato Kaelins or F. Lee Baileys or Mark Fuhrmans to be found. The People vs. O.J. Simpson was great because it tackled the racial, societal, media, and entertainment angles of the Simpson case and made us all re-examine it through new eyes. But it was��popular, in large part, because it let the rapidly fracturing and fragmenting American audience re-experience something we had all watched together. That was not a card that the Versace series could play. (If anything, the closest we got to an O.J.-style sensation in the last year was the Harding/Kerrigan revival that accompanied I, Tonya.)

But I think part of it was also that Versace failed the expectation game for a lot of viewers. In tackling the Versace murder under his American Crime Story banner, Murphy unavoidably promised a certain level of over-the-top camp and kitschiness. For all of O.J.‘s raves and respect from the critical community, it still delivered winking scenes with the Kardashians and Connie Britton as Faye Resnick explaining the finer points of the Brentwood Hello. Versace seemed to be promising something similar just by virtue of its cast, including Glee‘s prep-school heartthrob going against type as Andrew Cunanan and out gay pop hunk Ricky Martin as Versace’s longtime beau. And by casting the role of Donatella — by far the campiest character in this story’s orbit — with Academy Award-winner Penelope Cruz, Murphy seemed to be tacitly promising something at least a little bit gaudy.

Viewers hoping for the operatic, quasi-campy version of The Assassination of Gianni Versace could probably have just watched the first and last episodes and have been satisfied. Those are the episodes that feel most like the kind of show people were expecting. The decadent Versace lifestyle, the soapy intrigue surrounding Donatella and Antonio’s prickly relationship, the did-they-or-didn’t-they recreations of an imagined past encounter between Versace and Cunanan, and ultimately Andrew Cunanan stalking around the perimeter of Gianni Versace’s gilded lifestyle and destroying everything in the process. Smash those two episodes together, watch them like a TV movie, let Penelope Cruz in mourning snatch all your wigs off, and you’ll be good.

But what made The Assassination of Gianni Versace such a special season of television was what came in between those first and last episodes. That was where Murphy and Smith stepped away from the glitz and glamour and celebrity and camp and peered into the darker recesses of Andrew Cunanan’s story. The story that they sketch out, sometimes via firsthand accounts, sometimes via speculation, ultimately tells a sinister but deeply grounded story about the corrosive effects of homophobia. How the closet shames and warps; how institutional homophobia silences gay victims and inadvertently abets their killers; how the twin prisons of masculinity and status can wreak havoc on so many lives. The story in these middle episodes pretty much set aside the likes of Penelope Cruz and Ricky Martin so they could tell a story about tortured soldiers, frightened sons, prideful widows, and, yes, the making of a murderer. The result was some of the most restrained work of Murphy’s prolific career. And maybe that was the problem.

You can’t know for sure, of course. Nobody sends in a signed affidavit to the network when they choose not to watch something. But when ratings for Versace began to dip much lower than O.J., I had to wonder about Ryan Murphy’s traditionally robust FX audiences. Whether they were happy to watch Murphy’s queer extravaganzas when they were put into the service of grotesque horror stories and dishy tabloid tales about actresses’ animosities, but backed away when he decided to shine a more sober spotlight on the cruel homophobia of the not-very-distant past. Happy to watch Finn Wittrock camp it up as a queer-coded killer but not as a victim of the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell bureaucracy. Andrew Cunanan was a queer killer too, of course, but his killings offered no catharsis nor campy thrill. The killings were sad or brutal or unnecessarily cruel. O.J. Simpson got away with murder, but the circus was still pretty fun to watch. Not as much fun to be had here.

So, again, maybe Versace was never meant to catch fire in the culture the way that O.J. did. Maybe in an alternate universe, the Gianni-and-Donatella Fashion Hour told the story of the building of an empire that was cut down by a queer monster. By deciding to peel back the face of that queer monster and stare into the void inside, Murphy and Smith delivered a show that was much darker, though ironically no less illuminating, that the first American Crime Story season. Here’s hoping that with all the possibilities that suddenly lay before him, Ryan Murphy doesn’t take the relative quiet of season 2 as a reason to stay away from this kind of storytelling.

 

Where to stream The Assassination of Gianni Versace