American Crime Story S2: The Assassination of Gianni Versace

Supposed to be but got announced last year sometime that due to production they had to pushed back Katrina.

UGHHHH! 

I was really looking forward to them taking on Katrina...

Can't say the same about this (granted, it was only a 60 teaser, but still). 

The People vs. H. Katrina

But really, Katrina sounds coma-inducingly boring. Next they'll do a season on global warming or the Chipotle E. Coli outbreaks. Versace was a bit of a "I'll wait till I see a trailer" and it looks pretty watchable so far. Love that Cruz is doing something (sort of "high caliber") and in a lead role at that.

This show has a lot of material to work with due to the fact that andrew was a true con artist. If you have time google the vanity Fair article.

Edgar Ramirez is giving me a less flamboyant version of Peter Macdissi as Olivier in Six Feet Under. The voice and accent are the same!

Darren Criss is doing a fantastic job but honestly this is a hard show to enjoy. I say that more as a personal preference thing rather than a specific flaw with the show. It’s just so relentlessly brutal and unpleasant and knowing that people were actually murdered like this makes the violence all the more horrifying. This wasn’t a problem with season 1 because there’s only the two murders and we don’t see it onscreen. But in this, we’re seeing people butchered every episode. I’m not criticizing the approach taken and I’m gonna finish it but I’ve got a feeling I’m never gonna want to watch this ever again.

Even though we all know how it ends, this was an amazing season. It gets darker and darker by the episode and the acting is absolutely riveting. Its still too early and I'm not the best TV viewer to tell you this but: Darren Criss will sweep at the awards.

Having not watched the most recent episode, I kind of loved the show in its first four episodes. I felt it was going in a weird order, but I was okay with it if it helped to explain a bit of Cunanan's motives for killing Versace by showing his previous murders. At the same time, I was worried with the first two episodes that they were making Cunanan just a little bit too charming in a "feel bad for this psychopathic murderer of innocent people because he's just a broken soul". So when you see him do these despicable acts of violence right before our very eyes in a very disturbing way and then see its consequences with both the victims and their families, it kind of made you really feel for the victims for once in these types of shows.

... And then I was reminded who was running the show. From episode five on it did the EXACT thing I was hoping it would avoid and it tried to make Cunanan out to be a sympathetic person. I get it, if it were a fictional show, but to have the show be called "The Assassination of Gianni Versace" and to a) give more screen time to his murderer than Versace himself and b) to paint Cunanan out as someone you should feel sorry for because of his past when we're hardly getting to even know the victims... That's the kind of Ryan Murphy I knew full well in American Horror Story and that's why I think the O.J. season was a total fluke in terms of good quality. I was hoping he hit his stride with this show after the first four episodes (the fourth episode in particular was just insanely fucking good), but I can't stand the fact that the show keeps going back and forth in a weird order of sequences and we keep spending so much time getting to know Cunanan which we don't need to - we already know him well enough and we don't need to humanize the murderer of five real-life people when we could be humanizing those victims instead. But whatever, maybe it'll redeem itself in these last two episodes.

That being said - personal issues on it aside - Darren Criss is fucking killing it as Cunanan. Edgar Ramirez is great as well, and Penelope Cruz and Ricky Martin (surprisingly) are doing great work as well, but considering their limited time on the show, Criss is far and away the MVP. Just a sinister performance and I never knew he had it in him. Special mention to Cody Fern and Judith Light who absolutely deserve to win some Guest Emmys for Episode 4 and Episode 3 respectively. They just absolutely broke my damn heart in those episodes (even if we've seen more of Fern in the last few episodes than Ramirez himself, which is still okay because he's still putting in great work).

Finally finished it.

Overall, a hugely ambitious and fascinating season of TV that was structurally daring, sometimes to a fault. The constant jumping back-and-forth in time was an interesting concept that too often felt convoluted and unnecessary. Still, I really liked the approach of focusing entire episodes on one aspect of the story (this was particularly the case in the middle stretch, which was also the strongest). The cast was terrific across the board, with Penelope Cruz and especially Darren Criss being the standouts. 

It wasn't on the level of O.J. by a long shot, but it was a consistently engaging and challenging season that aimed high and succeeded more often than not. 8/10

I found this really a drag and even the (too much) much-praised Criss was giving a repetitive performance of no internal tension that I saw - I was really disappointed after all the raves I heard. This was let's all play pretend-dress up "ripped from the headlines" stuff to me. Supporting performances were kind of unintentionally funny. I actually thought this was a gross kind of vulgarity of a production too.

I guess this will win given the raves I've heard for Criss from everybody - but I just don't get it - over Pacino and Cumberbatch (previous winners) but Pacino out-acts him just on a professional technique level and while I haven't seen Cumberbatch yet but he out-acts Criss in the trailer of his piece. I mean he literally shows me more in the trailer than Criss did in total. That doesn't even count McLaughlin......

So now that I'm done with this I can say that it was a pretty decent run overall. The use of the Versace name in the title of the show was akin to clickbait, but it gave Cruz and Ramírez an opportunity to shine, so I can live with it I suppose. The Andrew / Jeff / David stuff was easily the most interesting part of the show, followed by the little bit dedicated to the Cunanan family. If you had had Versace himself appear in two episodes and Donatella as a minor cameo like role, it wouldn't have weakened the show at all, and had you eliminated Ricky 'Zoolander' Martin from the show completely, it would have improved it. Ultimately the shows greatest weakness was it's lead performer. Darren Criss deals in the worst kind of obviousness. He's clearly done nothing to improve his 'acting' between Glee and this, as his Andrew Cunanan was Blaine with anger issues.