Two years after the debut of The People v. O. J. Simpson: American Crime Story, Ryan Murphy and his team are back with another scripted deep-dive into another infamous true crime of the '90s. The murder of Gianni Versace (Edgar Ramirez) by narcissistic grifter-turned-drifter Andrew Cunanan (Darren Criss) is the inciting incident for a series that will explore Versace’s groundbreaking legacy as both a fashion icon and an openly gay star, alongside Cunanan’s mental decline as he becomes increasingly obsessed with Versace and everything he represents.
This was a distinctive and off-kilter opening episode: for one, it’s deliberately unclear for large portions whether what we’re seeing is fact or fiction. Everything Cunanan says—and by extension, everything we see from his perspective—is suspect, because this is a person with no fixed sense of self, who has learned to navigate the world by “telling people what they want to hear.” Though Cunanan is not the narrator of this show, he narrates enough of his own story to make the viewing experience deeply unsettling, and the ugliness at the heart of him makes for a compelling contrast with the beauty of everything else in Versace’s world.
Here are seven talking points from the first episode, "The Man Who Would Be Vogue."
1) It’s early days, but this may be the most stunning opening to any show in 2018.
I saw the first seven minutes of this episode back in August, and was so genuinely bowled over that I didn’t know what to do with myself afterwards. From the music to the cinematography to the meticulously detailed set (which recreates the interior of Versace’s Miami Beach home), it’s a ravishing, enthralling sequence laced with so much dread, because you know exactly what Versace is walking towards when he strolls back to his house from the cafe. It’s even more impactful when you consider that Versace had been seriously ill shortly before he died (expect to see this explored in a future episode). Every morning he woke up probably felt like a gift.
2) The show pulls a bait-and-switch early on.
In the sense that Gianni Versace’s name is in the title, but this is really Andrew Cunanan's show. I suspect some viewers who tuned in expecting to see the detailed story of Versace may be disappointed, but Cunanan is such a mesmerizingly unique character—and Darren Criss is such a revelation in this role—that the focus on him and his mental state is understandable. It is striking, though, that we go a full sixteen minutes before Versace himself has any significant dialogue, or even any screen time outside of that opening sequence.
3) Did Cunanan and Versace really meet?
This remains a hugely controversial point in real life—both whether they even met, and to what extent they knew each other. The episode begins with Cunanan gleefully telling his close friends and reluctant landlords, "Guess who I met? Gianni Versace!" and what we see in the club follows from there, suggesting we're seeing Cunanan's deeply unreliable version of events.
In the version we see, Cunanan approaches Versace in the VIP area of a Miami club, and barrels right through the intense social anxiety that I'm feeling by proxy, as Versace repeatedly and unsuccessfully tries to give him the brush-off. Cunanan finally gets Versace's interest, though, with a maybe-true-maybe-not story about his Italian-American mother, and the two begin to bond.
There's a second layer of unreliability to this, though. We cut from the Cunanan/Versace meeting in the bar to Cunanan telling a entirely different version of the story, wherein Versace approached him and Cunanan scornfully said "If you're Gianni Versace, I'm Coco Chanel." So... what is the truth? Presumably it's the version we saw, but the scene where Versace and Cunanan go to the opera together makes me skeptical on that front too. That scene involved such beautiful, telling dialogue—“That makes me want to cry.” “It makes me smile.”—that I strangely wanted to believe it was true, even though it seems unlikely Versace would have immediately taken to Cunanan in this way.
4) Andrew Cunanan is not so much a chameleon as a shapeshifter.
There's a Talented Mr. Ripley quality to Cunanan, a social climber who will convincingly transform himself into whatever he needs to be to con whoever he's with. I say convincingly, but in fact the cracks are beginning to show—the couple he's living with exchange weary glances as Cunanan rambles about his date with Versace, and he casually tosses off the F-word to make himself appear more heterosexual.
Directly before and after the shooting of Versace, Criss has a series of standout, terrifying, semi-cathartic moments of pure release (screaming maniacally into the ocean looks extremely appealing, unsure what this says about me?) but the beat that really stuck comes right when Versace's death has been confirmed on the news. A woman standing near Cunanan, watching the same television, puts a hand over her mouth in shock—and Cunanan, mirroring other humans as he's learned to do, does the same. But while the woman is tearful, Cunanan is hiding what looks like a maniacal smile behind his hand. Full-body shudder.
5) There was a brief nod to the second second of Feud.
Versace buying the Princess Diana issue of Vanity Fair was a tiny moment, but a significant one. Just over a month after Versace’s murder, Diana—one of his friends—would also die an untimely death. That connection aside, this may also be a sly reference to the planned second season of Feud, which will focus on Diana’s tempestuous relationship with her husband Charles.
6) “What will they find out?” “Everything.”
This is presumably a reference to the most controversial part of the series: Versace’s medical history, and specifically his HIV status. As was hinted at when the police came to question Antonio, the series will deal heavily with both Versace’s burden as an openly gay celebrity, and the rampant homophobia of the period, which arguably colored the way in which police investigated Cunanan’s crimes. Donatella (Penelope Cruz) is determined to prevent as much gossip from spreading as possible: “First, people weep,” she notes. “Then they whisper.” Her priority in the wake of her brother’s death is preserving his company, no matter what, because she refuses to let “this man, this nobody” kill Gianni twice. Little does she know this line is the best revenge she could possibly have—along with the Versace family spokesman declaring to the press that they had never met Cunanan—because there’s nothing Andrew Cunanan fears more than being seen as a nobody.
