Seven years ago, the second season of the Ryan Murphy-produced anthology series “American Crime Story” dramatized “The Assassination of Gianni Versace,” but the name was something of a misnomer. In the telling of screenwriter Tom Rob Smith, the story began with the namesake killing, but it worked backwards from there to profile the other, much less high-profile victims of Versace’s killer Andrew Cunanan. The bait-and-switch was a powerful rejoinder to how history has largely erased Cunanan’s victims, all of whom were other gay men, who didn’t happen to found a successful fashion brand.
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In 2023, the HBO docuseries “Last Call” made a similar argument about how homophobia shapes the public memory of, and police response to, serial killers who prey on marginalized groups. Working within a true crime industrial complex that tends to fetishize monstrous murderers and idealized victims (preferably white, female and middle class), these shows swam against the current to elevate the lives lost over the man who took them. They lived within a larger subgenre — one might deem it “anti-crime” — that includes works like “The Investigation,” the Scandinavian drama that refused to even name the killer of Swedish journalist Kim Wall, and the oeuvre of documentarian Liz Garbus, whose work on the Gilgo Beach and University of Idaho murders also centered the victims. But “Assassination” and “Last Call” took on a specific valence by focusing on gay men, whether contorted by the closet’s pressures into violent criminals or ignored by a society that didn’t value their safety.
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At first glance, the Peacock series “Devil in Disguise: John Wayne Gacy” seems inspired by another Murphy project. (The scripted project is not to be confused with the 2021 docuseries “John Wayne Gacy: Devil in Disguise,” which also aired on Peacock. Besides a near-identical name, the shows share an executive producer, Liz Cole.) Much like the Netflix hit “Monster,” which kicked off with a Jeffrey Dahmer-focused season in 2022, “Devil in Disguise” intends to inaugurate a seasonal anthology by piggybacking on the notoriety of a Midwestern, well, monster — a latter-day bogeyman so notorious their last name alone is synonymous with gore. The Dahmer edition of “Monster” shared some themes with “Last Call” and its ilk, but hewed closer to more typical Murphy sensationalism. “Devil in Disguise,” by contrast, is pointed and deliberate in its deconstruction of Gacy’s image, which almost singlehandedly cemented the archetype of the killer clown in American culture’s shared subconscious. The series quickly situates itself in the “Assassination” and “Last Call” school of thought, applying the same lens to an even higher-profile example.
Showrun by Patrick Macmanus, a veteran of such scripted true crime shows as “Dr. Death” and “The Girl From Plainville,” “Devil in Disguise” is principally distinguished by what it doesn’t show the viewer, who’s likely familiar with at least the broad outlines of the case. We never, for example, get a head-on look at Gacy (Michael Chernus) in his clown getup. We never see Gacy actually kill his victims — just sparing, oblique hints of the lead-up and aftermath to a select few of his 33 documented murders, all young men. And when Gacy stands trial late in the eight-episode season, we never see any courtroom testimony. We don’t need to; the guilty verdict and eventual death penalty are already predetermined.
“Devil in Disguise” fills the ensuing space with the victims and the families they left behind. The series begins with the disappearance of Gacy’s final victim, suburban Chicago teenager Rob Piest (Ryker Baloun), abducted from his place of work while his mother Elizabeth (Marin Ireland) was waiting in the car. Local detective Rafael Tovar (Gabriel Luna) and his boss Joe Kozenczak (James Badge Dale) make relatively short work of pinpointing Gacy, in part because the contractor did such a poor job of covering his tracks; multiple witnesses saw him speaking with Piest before his disappearance, and a prior conviction for sodomy only further raises suspicions. Once the jig is up, Gacy can’t stop talking, inviting cops into his home and helpfully pointing out where he’s hidden the bodies. The ease of Gacy’s eventual arrest makes for a gut-wrenching contrast with the dozens of human remains found in his crawl space. If Tovar and Kozenczak found him so quickly, why had no one else bothered to in the preceding six years?
The story alternates the investigation and prosecution that uncover the full extent of Gacy’s crimes with flashbacks that give the victims, after one or two of whom each episode is named, a face and a background. Some are kids just starting to explore their stigmatized sexuality; some are sex workers; some are dismissed as troublemakers; some are just looking for honest, well-paying work. In many cases, “Devil in Disguise” doesn’t even show them interacting with Gacy, letting the audience fill in the gaps between their final moments onscreen and the terrible fate that befell them soon after.
This approach achieves the desired emotional effect, decentering Gacy while driving home the human cost of law enforcement hamstrung by their own bias and a lack of modern technology like shared databases. Ireland does typically excellent work as a grieving mother, moving from distraught panic to quiet fury to resigned acceptance as the season progresses. At times, though, “Devil in Disguise” verges on pedantic, as when a repentant Kozenczak admits “I’m realizing that I have blind spots.” The structure can also be repetitive — not in the contents of the specific flashbacks, which communicate the victims’ individuality, but in the expected pivot from the present to its context.
As for Gacy himself, Chernus is sparing with overt menace. The actor is best known for supporting roles as comic buffoons in shows like “Severance” and “Orange Is the New Black,” a quality that suits Gacy’s pathetic need for approval and overplayed Midwestern folksiness. (“It’s colder than a witch’s itty bitty titty out here!”) His goal, and the show’s, is to cut Gacy down to size from the stuff of legend to an ordinary, if awful, man, beholden to such mundane influences as his father’s judgement and internalized bigotry. “He was killing off bits of himself that he hated — that his father hated,” is one psychologist’s straightforward read of Gacy’s motivation. This analysis arrives just halfway through the season, once again running into the issue of length and redundancy.
To put some distance between Gacy and the viewer, “Devil in Disguise” uses his lawyer Sam Amirante (Michael Angarano) as a kind of intermediary. Amirante, who knew Gacy through the local Chicago community before agreeing to represent him, is an odd choice of character to elevate to such prominence. His inner conflict over representing a man he knows to be guilty isn’t especially compelling when held up against the cumulative loss of life. Rather, Amirante comes off like a way for the show to observe Gacy up close without fully inhabiting his perspective. In that sense, at least, he serves his purpose, offering a front-row seat to Gacy’s compulsive lying and relentless self-delusion that lends some credence to Amirante’s ultimately unsuccessful insanity defense.
Even with these bumps in the road, however, “Devil in Disguise” maintains a clarity of purpose that grounds the show throughout. There’s a well-articulated sense of why we’re revisiting one of the most picked-over, thoroughly covered killing sprees of the 20th century, and what the series wants to say about the people and events it depicts. That quality is missing from so much true crime it’s worth praising, whatever flaws emerge in the telling.
All eight episodes of “Devil in Disguise: John Wayne Gacy” are now streaming on Peacock.