The second season of American Crime Story finished airing with last night's finale episode, but the series that chronicled the murder of fashion designer Gianni Versace was actually supposed to air as Season 3. Season 2 was slated to explore the events of Hurricane Katrina as an adaptation of the Douglas Brinkley book The Great Deluge and had gone so far as to cast Annette Bening, Dennis Quaid and Matthew Broderick in lead roles. But in August 2017, two months after Assassination of Gianni Versace took over the second season slot, FX announced a creative pivot for the Katrina-based season. Instead of a comprehensive look at the government's handling of the natural disaster and its aftermath, the show would focus on the events at Memorial Medical Center, where Dr. Anna Pou and her staff were forced to make painful decisions in the midst of the criss.
Here, everything we know about Katrina: American Crime Story.
1) It's based on the book Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital by Sheri Fink.
In 2010, Sheri Fink won a Pulitzer Prize for her 2009 ProPublica/New York Times Magazine article, "The Deadly Choices at Memorial." Fink chronicles the decisions made under unimaginable stress: as the hospital went days without power and turned into an emergency situation in its own right, Dr. Pou and some of her colleagues allegedly decided to euthanize patients they believed could not survive evacuation.
In the aftermath of the hurricane, 45 bodies were found at Memorial, many with heightened levels of morphine. Dr. Pou and intensive care nurses Cheri Landry and Lori Budo were charged with second-degree murder, but the charges against Landry and Budo were dropped and a grand jury declined to indict Pou.
The 2013 book Frink wrote based on that reporting will form the basis for American Crime Story Season 3. "We decided to do a more intimate version of [the Hurricane Katrina] story that I think is much more interesting than topical," executive producer Ryan Murphy told reporters at the Television Critics Association Press Tour in January, according to The Hollywood Reporter. "[It's] a look at the health care industry and disasters and global warming." Executive producer Brad Simpson also discussed the decision to take on a more specific angle for the Katrina-based season:
"Our best scripts were about Memorial Hospital, and the people who were trapped there. Doctors who started out trying to save lives, ended up euthanizing patients. It tracks everything that happened in Katrina. There's people of different classes and races, all in that hospital. There are people that feel like they've been abandoned by their government, and there are people who are making decisions about triage, who lives and who dies, that outside of that bubble look horrific."
2) Sarah Paulson will play Dr. Anna Pou.
Paulson won an Emmy for her role as Marcia Clark in The People v. O. J. Simpson: American Crime Story. She'll return to the ACS franchise in the role of Dr. Pou.
3) Annette Bening says she was written out of the new season.
Though THR reports that ACS is attempting to find roles for the three A-listers cast in the original iteration (Annette Bening as Louisiana governor Kathleen Blanco, Dennis Quaid as President George W. Bush and Matthew Broderick as FEMA director Michael D. Brown), Bening told Vanity Fair in December that she doesn't think that will happen. She added, “[Murphy] was right: he needs to do it thoughtfully and carefully. And maybe just making the Memorial hospital the microcosm of the larger thing is the way to do it . . . It was a great, great tragedy, and there was so much unnecessary suffering and death because of racism and poverty. So it’s important when we’re told that story again that he does it in the way that he thinks is right.”
4) Murphy doesn't know when they'll start shooting.
In an interview with Entertainment Weekly after last night's Season 2 finale, Murphy revealed that "a lot of things [are] cooking" with Season 3. "We’re never going to have a Crime Story unless we have the scripts down," he said. "I am not in a rush to move forward with anything unless it’s perfect. So we’ll see what’s next for that."
