This much has already been said about The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story, which premiered on FX on Wednesday night: It is not really about Gianni Versace. It’s not even predominantly about the aftermath of his assassination. Instead, the show should be named after the magazine article from which it came: “The Killer’s Trail” by Maureen Orth, published in Vanity Fair in 1997 (and which became her book Vulgar Favors). “The Killer’s Trail” would be the most literal descriptor for Versace: ACS, an unrelenting, nearly murder-an-episode, sleek slaughterfest that is actually about Andrew Cunanan, Versace’s murderer.

Ryan Murphy’s latest American Crime Story installment does begin with Gianni Versace, who was gunned down by Cunanan in front of his Miami mansion in 1997. But the anthology series is much more about the four murders committed by Cunanan in the two months he spent on the run preceding that act. Cunanan—an equal parts charismatic and off-putting poseur who crafted outlandish stories about himself and his family for the better part of his life; a gay man who traveled in some of the highest and lowest echelons of closeted, clandestine, and out society during the years of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell—is a fascinating, gruesome figure. Orth had plenty of material for her exhaustive book about him. So why is this show named for Versace?

I’m willing to posit that it’s because, along with a recent crop of similar television shows and films we could call “prestige true crime,” Versace: ACS doesn’t want to admit what it really is. For one thing, like its predecessor The People v. O.J. Simpson, the show arrives amid a glut of ’90s nostalgia, glammed-up with Day-Glo fashion, questionable hairstyles, and beloved dance beats, as if to staunch the spilled blood with spandex and hairspray. Content creators, we’ll call them, since these productions are available streaming, airing weekly, or playing at the movie theater, have struck gold with crime stories from the ’90s, catering to millennials who were too young to really understand them, and to those older who are eager to relive the era they personified. Versace: ACS is part of the explosion of a centuries-old genre that used to be synonymous with trash, or pulp, and has now, by trend and circumstance, been elevated to prestige entertainment, where it bleeds onto our screens small and large.

True crime has always been about details, about feeding a streak of voyeurism with any and all facts about a past case (think of all the Murderpedia-type sites online, and their Reddit offshoots for discussing endless theories and motives). Of course, the more unbelievable the details the better, which means that the most notorious crimes catch the most attention. Serial killers, like Cunanan, provide multiple crime scenes and victims to pore over; sensational incidents with no resolution, like the murder of JonBenét Ramsey, can provide fixation forever; and crimes involving attractive young women, like Amanda Knox’s indictment, imprisonment, and release for the slaying of Meredith Kercher, invite ample opportunities for lurid dime-store analysis.