American Crime Story season 2 will focus on the crimes of Hurricane Katrina and how America failed New Orleans.
American Crime Story, the FX anthology, kicked off its first season with one of the great trials of the Twentieth Century, the O.J. Simpson trial that caught the attention of the nation from the moment the white Ford Bronco took off on a medium-speed chase on every news channel. The series received 22 Emmy nominations from a canvass of luminaries. American Crime Story season 2 will focus on the crimes that occurred in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, which devastated New Orleans during former president George W. Bush’s watch.
The second season will be tonally and thematically different. Besides crimes like murders and rapes that happened during Katrina, there was a larger issue of the government not rescuing victims or being prepared to take care of New Orleans. The series will focus on the famous players and people who weren't famous during Katrina. Co-producer Nina Jacobson has reportedly long been fascinated with the injustice of Hurricane Katrina and the series will look at what happened during Katrina as a crime that could have been prevented.
The cast for season 2 might be much larger. Ryan Murphy, who created the show as well as the anthology series American Horror Story and Scream Queens, talked with The Hollywood Reporter about how season two will mix things up as it tackles the national disaster Hurricane Katrina.
“We're not interested in doing a trial-of-the-week or murder-of-the-month; we're interested in tackling crimes and events that have some sort of social importance,” Murphy told THR. “That's why we're interested in Katrina, and we've been researching it quite heavily for a year before we're even writing it.
The scope of the series will also be vast, but Murphy says that doesn’t mean it won’t be intimate.
“I think it's going to be between 13 and 15 episodes, so it's very big — and every episode has a theme, like O.J. did,” Murphy explained. “You follow a cast of characters from before the storm hits to its aftermath, and we're spending a lot of time, energy and resources on it.”
American Horror Story season 2 won’t have the same soap opera dynamics that played out in the freshman season. Most of the players weren’t big names as the devastation affected a portion of the population who don’t get the same kind of screen time. Many of these people are still putting their lives back together.
“Well, it's an amazing tragedy you cannot believe happened in America, but along with the overwhelming sadness of what happened to New Orleans and its people you have amazing stories of survival,” Murphy said.
“You have the best of people and the worst of people, and we're laying into questions like, What do you do when you're in a city and your government has abandoned you? How do you live? How do you get out? And you get out by climbing up and pulling up people with you, and to a large degree that's what the miniseries is about. It's not just what happened but heroic stories about people surviving — or, in some cases, dying helping others. So it's upsetting, but it's also uplifting.”
American Crime Story: The People v. O.J. Simpson starred the ensemble cast Cuba Gooding, Jr. as the football Hall of Famer whose gloves didn’t fit, Sarah Paulson as prosecuting attorney Marcia Clark, David Schwimmer as Robert Kardashian, John Travolta as Robert Shapiro, Courtney B. Vance as Johnnie Cochran and Nathan Lane as world class attorney F. Lee Bailey.
Ryan is known for turning seasonal casts into troupe players and Sarah Paulson and John Travolta have already gone on record as saying they would be interested in coming back, but there is no guarantee that the series will feature the same actors.
“I don't think it's going to be like American Horror Story, where you see almost the entire troupe return,” Murphy said. “You'll see some people, not all of them, but we haven't figured that out yet because we're right in the middle of the writing process. I'm having general meetings with actors, but I don't like to offer anything to anybody unless they have a big chunk of things to read because I want them to know what they're signing up for.”
American Crime Story season 2 will return in 2017 on FX.
SOURCE: THR
