American Crime Story

Ryan Murphy’s name is on a good deal of television that shouts, and American Crime Story is the one that keeps its voice down. Each season takes a scandal America once watched on the news and plays it as drama, straight-faced and at length: the O. J. Simpson trial across ten episodes in 2016, the murder of Gianni Versace across nine in 2018, the Clinton impeachment across ten in 2021. The first is the best courtroom television we have seen in years. The second is stranger and less even. The third is the one we would skip.

Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski built the Simpson season as a workplace drama. Marcia Clark (Sarah Paulson) and Christopher Darden (Sterling K. Brown) are prosecutors with a case they think is strong, a boss in Gil Garcetti (Bruce Greenwood) who wants to be seen winning it, and a judge in Lance Ito (Kenneth Choi) who enjoys the cameras more than he should. Paulson plays Clark as a woman who has never had to be liked before and is bewildered to find it is now part of the job. Brown gives Darden the stillness of a man counting the cost of every sentence before he says it.

We were got at early. The second episode is the freeway: a white Bronco moving slowly with a man in the back seat holding a gun to his own head, while people gather on the overpasses to cheer him on. We had seen the footage a hundred times and it had become a joke. Here it is horrible, because the camera stays in the car with Cuba Gooding Jr. and makes us sit with him. Gooding is the casting most critics have quarrelled with, and they are not wrong: he is slighter than Simpson and his voice is thinner. It worked for us anyway, because he plays a man who has no idea who he is once the crowd stops telling him, and the poor fit is part of that.

Lou Eyrich’s costumes do quiet work throughout, putting Clark in boxy suits she seems to wear under protest and letting the defence table gleam. Mac Quayle’s score is low electronic pulses that know when to stop. The season’s one lazy reflex is its winking at the future: the Kardashian children are lectured about fame more than once, and each time the writers step out to nudge us.

The Assassination of Gianni Versace, written by Tom Rob Smith, is braver construction and lumpier television. It opens on the killing and runs backwards through the life of Andrew Cunanan (Darren Criss), so that each episode shows us a lie he told before the one we have just watched. Criss is remarkable, charming in exactly the way that makes the neck prickle. Édgar Ramírez, Ricky Martin as Antonio D’Amico and Penélope Cruz as Donatella Versace get less to do than the billing suggests, because the season belongs to the killer, and the Versace scenes drift through Judy Becker’s Miami rooms like an advertisement for a life.

Impeachment, from Sarah Burgess, has Beanie Feldstein as Monica Lewinsky and Margo Martindale as Lucianne Goldberg. Feldstein makes Lewinsky young in a way that is hard to watch, all confidence and no defences. But the season has decided in advance who deserves our sympathy and hands it out in the dialogue, and ten episodes is a long time to be told the same thing. We were bored in the middle stretch, and then we were cross, because Feldstein was doing work the writing would not.

Murphy, John Singleton, Anthony Hemingway, Daniel Minahan and Rachel Morrison are among the directors, and Nelson Cragg, Simon Dennis and Blake McClure share a camera style that is clean, warm and flattering, closer to a magazine than to the grain of the period. Ten credited editors keep the Simpson season at the pace of a good thriller; later they work harder to hide thinner material. Start at the beginning and treat those first ten episodes as one long film. Carry on to Versace if Criss has caught you. The 15 certificate is fair: there is a murder, there is a man with a gun in a car, and a great deal of talking about both.