Fashion victim

By common consent, including Bafta’s, The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story was one of the best TV dramas of 2016. Produced by Ryan Murphy, it laid out the story in a beautifully clear, largely chronological way that made us appreciate, all over again, just how strange the whole O.J. business was — not least thanks to the wider social forces at work. Now, we’ve got The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story (BBC2, Wednesday), also produced by Ryan Murphy and also tackling an event from the 1990s that manages to seem both shockingly particular and neatly revealing of more general trends.

At which point, all similarities end, because here Murphy (who also directed the first episode) takes a far more fragmented and less viewer-friendly approach. The show hops backwards and forwards in time, showing us scenes and several unnamed minor characters that are yet to be linked, and for quite long stretches it appears perfectly content to leave us somewhere between intrigued and baffled.

Last week’s first episode, for example, began with a long, pre-credits sequence that intercut scenes of Versace’s highly agreeable life in his (literally) gilded Miami Beach villa with regular sightings of a handsome young man beside the ocean, alternately reading a history of Vogue and fondling a gun. The man then headed to the villa, saw Versace returning from a morning stroll and shot him dead. The sequence certainly established the programme’s ability to blend sumptuous visuals with the slow cranking-up of something very sinister indeed. But it also demonstrated an equally characteristic willingness to be deliberately enigmatic about what on earth was going on — and, more specifically, why.