Inside the house, Edgar Ramirez, the Venezuelan actor playing Versace, sat in a shaded courtyard, his hair caked with gun-wound makeup, his face lowered in his hands. There was a splash of red on the marble steps. Cunanan was played by Darren Criss, a star of Murphy’s biggest hit, “ Glee.” I’d visited the set that day, too, arriving to find ambulances, cops, and paparazzi swarming outside. The previous day, Murphy had filmed the murder scene. In 1997, a young gay serial killer named Andrew Cunanan shot Versace to death there as the designer, who was fifty, was returning from his morning stroll. A small bronze statue of a kneeling Aphrodite stood at the top of the mansion’s front steps. We were outside the Casa Casuarina, the Mediterranean-style mansion that the Italian fashion designer Gianni Versace renovated and considered his masterwork-a building with airy courtyards and a pool inlaid with dizzy ribbons of red, orange, and yellow ceramic tiles. Murphy, referring to TV critics (including me) who have applied “camp” to his work, said, “I will admit that it really used to bug the shit out of me. People rarely use the term to describe a melodrama made by a straight man even when “camp” is meant as a compliment, it contains an insult, suggesting a musty smallness. To Murphy, “camp” describes not irony but something closer to clumsiness, the accident you can’t look away from. Murphy prefers a different label: “baroque.” Between shots, the showrunner-who has overseen a dozen television series in the past two decades-elaborated, with regal authority, on this idea. “I think that he was, like, ‘It’s my tone-and my tone is unique.’ ” “I don’t think that when John Waters made ‘ Female Trouble’ that he was, like, ‘I want to make a camp piece,’ ” Murphy told me last May, as we sat in a production tent in South Beach, Florida, where he was directing the pilot of “American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace,” a nine-episode series for FX. Ryan Murphy hates the word “camp.” He sees it as a lazy catchall that gets thrown at gay artists in order to marginalize their ambitions, to frame their work as niche.

Studio triumph james murphy