The second season of FX’s American Crime Story anthology series will focus on Hurricane Katrina. According to The Hollywood Reporter, executive producer Brad Simpson confirmed the news during a press conference with the Television Critics Association yesterday.
“There’s a writers room right now, working on Katrina,” Simpson said. “We’re just starting to get the episodes in. I’m sadly not going to make any big news, but you will have the famous people. You will also have the people who weren’t famous. … It’s going to be about the intensity of what it was like to be there on the ground — and also the bigger crime, that Katrina was something that was predictable.”
The anthology series began earlier this year with its first season, the critically-acclaimed The People v. O.J. Simpson. The program, which starred Cuba Gooding Jr., Sterling K. Brown, Sarah Paulson, David Schwimmer, John Travolta, Nathan Lane, Courtney B. Vance and others, was nominated for 22 Emmy awards and recieved a 97% rating on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes. The series dealt with the real-life events surrounding O.J. Simpson’s sensational and controversial trial for the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman.
CBS News reports that Brad Simpson credits series creator Ryan Murphy with the idea of dealing with Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath in season two, though he added that he and his producing partner Nina Jacobson had been fascinated by the topic for some time. He also noted that writers have employed a researcher to help gather information on the subject, and that they are working off of an unspecified book as well.
“There were crimes that happened during Katrina,” Simpson said. “Murders, rapes, you know, and there’s also the crime of us not rescuing these people and not being prepared to take care of New Orleans.”
Simpson was unable to confirm if any of the actors from season one will return, but he did say that they would “like to use as many actors as we can.”
Hopefully the team behind American Crime Story can do justice to the subject matter, which is all too real for many people in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, as past attempts at portraying the storm and its aftermath on screen have had mixed results. HBO’s Treme, for instance, acted as a love letter to New Orleans and a serious examination of Katrina’s consequences. Fox’s K-Ville, on the other hand, was little more than a cliched cop drama that insensitively used post-Katrina New Orleans as a prop.
American Crime Story will return to FX in 2017.
