American Crime Story‘s highly anticipated follow-up to its acclaimed OJ-anchored debut won’t be about Hurricane Katrina after all. That season is being pushed back and the FX drama’s take on the murder of Gianni Versace is now being bumped up to season 2 status.
Variety reports that The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story will be the next ACS offering following a reshuffling in the order of Ryan Murphy’s anthology series rollout. The Versace edition of the program will have Darren Criss, Edgar Ramirez, Penelope Cruz and Ricky Martin in prominent roles and is set to premiere in early 2018. The delayed Katrina season, which has Annette Benning, Matthew Broderick and Dennis Quaid onboard, will hit FX later on the calendar with shooting beginning in the new year. It’s not like there’s a shortage of American tragedies or freelance prestige TV stars at the ready, so these sorts of change-ups can’t be completely unexpected.
The anthology format of the show makes each cycle (thanks Tyra!) its own animal, but the American Crime Story brand is pretty dang strong at the moment with Emmys, Golden Globes and connecting as a pop culture juggernaut to its credit. The wait until 2018 does have a nagging question attached, though. Will we have already suffered from true crime burnout by that point? (We’ve been more receptive to the true crime boom than the time travel boom, for what it’s worth.) The People vs. O.J. Simpson had the benefit of arriving before mainstream saturation, so there’s the potential for viewer fatigue by the time we get there, but we had such a nice time hanging out in the celeb-stuffed cable-friendly first season that there’s no reason to be pessimistic. Don’t make us wait too long, please.
(Via Variety)
