American Crime Story Producers Are Hunting for Their Own Making a Murderer Season

Producing super-team Brad Simpson and Nina Jacobson are responsible, individually and collectively, for major money-making franchises like Diary of a Wimpy Kid and the Hunger Games. When they decided to try their hand at TV in 2016, with American Crime Story: The People v. O.J. Simpson, they hit ratings and awards-season gold. The second season of the FX franchise, titled The Assassination of Gianni Versace, wraps up Wednesday night to a slightly more muted reception, and the pair acknowledge that fans have wondered why there wasn’t more of the titular Versace family in this show.

“We’ve obviously seen the tweets,” Simpson said as part of a wide-ranging interview with Vanity Fair’s Still Watching: Versace podcast. “ ‘Oh, The Assassination of Gianni Versace is really Andrew [Cunanan]’s story.]’ There’s a lot of surprise and I think we were a little underprepared.” Jacobson and Simpson went on to explain how that reaction will impact the future of the American Crime Story franchise, and why, perhaps, we might not see any famous name at all in future season titles.

“We had done the People v. O.J. Simpson, which wasn’t really about O.J. Simpson,” Brad Simpson explains. “The surprise of that show was that O.J. Simpson was really a supporting character. After the first two episodes he just sits in court until the finale. Really it was about the lawyers. We were surprised by the way people thought the Versaces would be leads instead of supporting characters.”

According to Simpson, when the Versace team was figuring out episodes 3 and 4 of the season, which involve the deaths of Lee Miglin, Jeff Trail, David Madson, and William Reese, they felt it would be “disrespectful” to cut away from the deaths of these four men simply to spend time in the more luxurious and high-profile world of the Versaces. Though he concedes the story of the Versaces after Gianni’s murder was more “melodramatic,” he worried delving too deep into that world would result in criticizing the famous fashion family and break the rule of the season, which was to not “demonize” the victims in any way.

The finale, which was edited together a good deal after the first eight episodes, due to some availabilities, does, however, spend more time with Penelope Cruz’s Donatella Versace and Ricky Martin’s Antonio D’Amico—as well as a brief fantasy sequence with Edgar Ramirez’s Gianni Versace. But Simpson insists the increased Versace presence in the finale is not a reaction to audiences “clamoring” for more Cruz and Martin. “I honestly think if we had given people more Versace, they would have gotten tired of it.”

As for the future of the franchise, Jacobson said they are currently “up to our neck” in developing the next few seasons, which will reportedly still cover both the Hurricane Katrina disaster and the Bill Clinton/Monica Lewinsky scandal. She acknowledges that pursuing true-crime stories that serve as a mirror for the clash between “who we say we are as Americans and who we actually are as Americans” doesn’t always result in the “fastest turnaround time,” but neither producer sounds at all rushed in their process of trying to get it right.

In fact, Simpson explains, that in order to find a story that says something “bigger and deeper and more disturbing about America,” the duo are “on the hunt for a story that people don’t know,” similar to Netflix’s smash true-crime docuseries, Making a Murderer. They want an “untold story for future seasons” and tease that everyone should “stay tuned” for that announcement. In the meantime, however, for all the fans who are still cross over the missing Versaces in The Assassination of Gianni Versace, Brad Simpson has a promise to make: “We’ll be more careful on how we title future seasons.”

The Versace: American Crime Story Cast and Their Real-Life Counterparts