American Crime Story ...
American Crime Story is an American anthology true crime television series developed by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, who are also executive producers, alongside Brad Falchuk, Nina Jacobson, Ryan Murphy, and Brad Simpson. The series is the second installment in the American Story media franchise, following American Horror Story.[3] Each season is presented as a self-contained miniseries and is independent of the events in other seasons. Alexander and Karaszewski did not return after the first season, but retain executive-producer credits.[4] In the United States, the series is broadcast on FX. In January 2023, the series was renewed for a fourth season.The fourth season will premiere in 2024.
American Crime Story ...
Based on Jeffrey Toobin's The Run of His Life: The People v. O. J. Simpson, the season explores the O. J. Simpson (Cuba Gooding Jr.) murder case as well as the combination of prosecution confidence, defense wiliness, and the Los Angeles Police Department's history with the city's African-American community that gave a jury what it needed: reasonable doubt.[11][12]
Based on Maureen Orth's Vulgar Favors: Andrew Cunanan, Gianni Versace, and the Largest Failed Manhunt in U.S. History, the season examines the July 1997 assassination of legendary fashion designer Gianni Versace (Édgar Ramírez) by sociopathic spree killer Andrew Cunanan (Darren Criss).[13][14]
The so-called Katrina season was originally planned to be the second season of the series, with The Assassination of Gianni Versace following as the third. However, in June 2017, it was announced that Katrina would not begin production until early 2018 and that Versace would air in early 2018, replacing Katrina as the show's second installment.[62] In early February 2019, John Landgraf acknowledged that the Katrina storyline was cancelled and won't be the subject of any season of the series.[9]
Sadly, Attorney General Janet Reno, who was previously played by Jane Lynch in Manhunt: Unabomber, is not a character here. But seeing Lynch reprise the role would have been the ultimate true crime, multi-universe crossover.
The final Assassination of Gianni Versace episode aired Wednesday night, bringing the second season of Ryan Murphy's true crime anthology series, American Crime Story, to its thrilling end. The episode, "Alone," takes viewers through the final days of serial killer Andrew Cunanan (Darren Criss), whose life ended in suicide eight days after he murdered famed fashion designer Gianni Versace.
Another character American Crime Story revisits via an FBI interrogation is Ronnie, played by New Girl's Max Greenfield. As addressed in the Episode 2 fact vs. fiction breakdown, he is based on the real-life person, Ronnie Holston. American Crime Story greatly plays up Holston's importance in Cunanan's story. While he did stay on the same floor of the Miami hotel as Cunanan, there's no evidence he and Cunanan were friends. (And he looked nothing like Greenfield.)
Soon after the episode's imagined phone call scene with his father, Criss's Cunanan sees Dad interviewed on TV. Modesto denies his son is a homosexual, insists Andrew is innocent and announces plans to sell the movie rights to his son's story.
The show also leaves out what came next for Carreira: a hard-fought battle to collect the reward money for providing information on the killer, which he was eventually granted. In a June 2017 Sun-Sentinel story, Carreira said he recieved more than $50,000.
Monica would get her redemption, but not until the #MeToo era resurfaced and reframed the story, none of which is depicted in Impeachment beyond the fact that the series itself, for which she consulted on every episode, is its own form of redemption.
The project was shelved last year, but FX Networks chairman John Landgraf tells USA TODAY that it's being revived because writer Sarah Burgess conceived of a new "feminist" take on the script that tells the story from the women's points of view.
"People have been co-opting and telling my part in this story for decades. In fact, it wasn't until the past few years that I've been able to fully reclaim my narrative; almost 20 years later. But I'm so grateful for the growth we've made as a society that allows people like me who have been historically silenced to finally reintroduce my voice to the conversation. This isn't just a me problem. Powerful people, often men, take advantage of those subordinate to them in myriad ways all the time. Many people will see this as such a story and for that reason, this narrative is one that is, regretfully, evergreen."
It should be noted that there has been talk of a fourth season focused on Studio 54, and how its proprietors, Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager, were sent to jail for tax fraud in 1980. That would move the series out of the 1990s, but it'd certainly be juicy and would allow for some pretty amazing casting possibilities. We should also note that while all notorious crime stories have been covered in other works to some degree, some have been done so recently and/or in formats too similar to ACS to consider repeating. (We're looking at you, NBC's subpar Menendez brothers miniseries.)
Before O.J. and the Menendez brothers, there was William Kennedy Smith, who was accused of raping a woman in Palm Beach, Florida, and whose trial was among the first to be televised. Spurring interest was the fact that Smith was a member of the Kennedy political dynasty and had been out with his uncle, Senator Ted Kennedy the night of the alleged rape. While the Kennedys have been documented ad nauseam in American culture, this particular chapter in their history has not, even though it was a major scandal and a pivotal moment for crime coverage in media and the sexual assault discourse (the TV coverage famously obscured Smith's accuser's face with a big blue circle in order to preserve her anonymity).
This story truly has it all, including angles for the media, politics (including President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, if Murphy hasn't burned himself out on them after Impeachment). In 2000, five-year-old Elian Gonzalez was recovered in an inner tube off the coast of Ft. Lauderdale, his mother and her boyfriend having died trying to escape to Florida from Cuba. The international tug of war that followed between the Cuban and U.S. governments, the Cuban-American community in Florida, and a rabid news media with agendas on both sides of the political aisle dominated the news cycle for weeks.
Major Players: A major geopolitical story like this would give Murphy the chance to cast Bill and Hillary again, sure, but he'd also get to cast Fidel Castro. Another major player, aside from Gonzalez and his family, would be Attorney General Janet Reno, who became such a flashpoint of U.S. government overreach that she'd end up getting parodied by Will Ferrell on Saturday Night Live.
Major Players: Telling Fromme's story opens things up to cast other members of the Manson family, which Murphy did briefly during American Horror Story: Cult (Fromme herself wasn't included). He could also steer into the whole Assassins vibe and twin Fromme's story with Sarah Jane Moore, who also tried to assassinate Ford in 1975. The prospect of an American Crime Story season swirling around the media sensation of two female attempted assassins feels right up this show's alley.
HOLMES: You probably know a lot of the story, but here goes. Monica Lewinsky was a White House intern with whom President Bill Clinton began a sexual relationship that took place in the White House. Later, when another woman named Paula Jones came forward with an accusation that Clinton had sexually harassed her, the investigation of that accusation came to include Lewinsky as well. That was partly because Lewinsky confided in an older friend named Linda Tripp, who secretly recorded their conversations about their relationship and turned them over to prosecutor Ken Starr. Clinton was eventually impeached for perjury and obstruction of justice, although he was eventually acquitted.
HARRIS: Yes, highly recommend it - delved into many of the things that are talked about here. And so those things are more fresh in my mind. And watching this, I felt as though it just feels like a flashback. It feels like we're kind of going through the motions, and I don't really get the sense that it's doing what the creators intended, which is to sort of elevate the three women at the center of this story.
KURTZLEBEN: Because Monica Lewinsky has already gone out there and tried to - and not just tried to but successfully recaptured her story, remade it and said, OK, this was terrible. I am now an anti-bullying advocate. I'm retelling this myself. I have rethought the power dynamics here. And as a society, we have rethought the power dynamics. We have rethought how feminists treated Monica Lewinsky back then. We have rethought how consensual this relationship really could have been between the leader of the free world and an early 20-something intern.
And I think the show becomes a lot more interesting to me right around, like, the sixth and seventh episodes. You start to get this story of how Monica Lewinsky was sort of brought in by law enforcement and became, like, ensnarled in this investigation. There's an episode that I think is very good that deals with her being questioned and kind of kept in a - like, a hotel in a mall. It is a - quite an episode that I thought was really effective.
And, I mean, Linda Tripp is a good example here of there are very intentional choices made about her; not just the fat suit, but she is portrayed so much as this sad small person who wants a bigger life. Like, she eats a lot of sad TV dinners in front of the TV, is just obsessed with power and status and acting like a spy when she's talking to Michael Isikoff, the reporter who was trying to break this story. 041b061a72