As ‘American Crime Story’ Turns 10, Will We Ever Get Another Season?

Ten years ago, American Crime Story wowed viewers, TV critics, and Emmy voters with The People v. O.J. Simpson, the anthology’s debut season. Starring Cuba Gooding Jr. as the namesake football star, Courtney B. Vance and John Travolta as his attorneys, and Sarah Paulson and Sterling K. Brown as prosecutors in his murder trial, the first season premiered on February 2, 2016, to record numbers for FX. In fact, the FX called ACS’s first episode the most-watched original scripted series premiere in the network’s 22-year history. Then that season earned 22 Emmy nominations — second only to Game of Thrones — and nine wins, including trophies for Paulson, Vance, Brown, and the limited series itself.

American Crime Story’s second season, The Assassination of Gianni Versace — starring Édgar Ramírez, Darren Criss, Ricky Martin, and Penélope Cruz — continued the Emmy glory two years later, with 18 nominations and seven wins.

Season 3, Impeachment featured Paulson as Linda Tripp, Beanie Feldstein as Monica Lewinsky, and Clive Owen as U.S. President Bill Clinton. It arrived in 2021 to lesser fanfare, with a smaller audience, less critical acclaim, and fewer Emmy nods.

So where’s Season 4? After two high-profile false starts and a lot of radio silence, here’s what we know about American Crime Story’s future as we reach the franchise’s 10th anniversary.

An American Crime Story season about Hurricane Katrina was called off.

In January 2016, after the success of The People vs. O.J. Simpson, American Crime Story executive producer Ryan Murphy told The Hollywood Reporter the anthology’s second season would center on Hurricane Katrina. “I want this show to be a socially conscious, socially aware examination of different types of crime around the world,” he explained. “And in my opinion, Katrina was a f***ing crime — a crime against a lot of people who didn’t have a strong voice — and we’re going to treat it as a crime.”

In the original incarnation of Katrina: American Crime Story, Matthew Broderick was cast as FEMA Director Michael D. Brown, Annette Bening as Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco, and Dennis Quaid as U.S. President George W. Bush.

Months later, though, FX announced The Assassination of Gianni Versace as the new idea for Season 2, and network CEO John Landgraf announced a “pivot” in the Katrina idea. Murphy had acquired the nonfiction Sheri Fink book Five Days at Memorial, which tracks the controversial actions of New Orleans doctors at the flooded Memorial Medical Center in the days after the storm.

News of the Katrina idea’s demise came in February 2019, when Deadline reported that FX was no longer moving forward with the idea and that Hollywood producer Scott Rudin, who owned the rights to Fink’s book, might shop the project elsewhere. TV producer Carlton Cuse later snapped up the rights and teamed up with screenwriter John Ridley to create the miniseries Five Days at Memorial, which premiered on Apple TV+ in August 2022.

The proposed Studio 54-set season doesn’t seem to be happening either.

In August 2021, FX announced that Studio 54: American Crime Story was being developed as a possible fourth season of the ACS franchise. As the network explained in a logline, Studio 54 would follow the rise and fall of Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager, who turned the titular Manhattan nightclub into a mecca for parties, music, sex, and drugs, before getting convicted of tax fraud less than three years later.

Since then, we’ve heard precious little about the Studio 54 project, aside from Landgraf’s assurance in January 2023 that a fourth season of ACS was “headed towards production.”

The last substantial update on Studio 54 came in September 2024, when Variety reported that the season didn’t seem likely after interviewing executive producers Nina Jacobson and Brad Simpson, who were then focused on Love Story (née American Love Story).

“The reason we can never announce anything, ever again, is because once, Ryan said ‘Studio 54’ and now it’s 10 years later, and in every interview we have, people bring it up,” Simpson told the magazine at the time. “We develop multiple things and multiple ideas. It’s not that we’re trying to be secretive, we’re seeing what bubbles up and what comes in. We’ve learned if we announce something, it becomes a Wikipedia entry.”

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Meanwhile, other Ryan Murphy productions have depicted other American crime stories.

Following American Crime Story’s debut, Murphy ushered to TV screens other true-crime tales that could have been ACS seasons. The three produced seasons of Monster, an anthology Murphy co-created with Ian Brennan, revisit the murders committed by Jeffrey Dahmer, Lyle and Erik Menendez, and Ed Gein. The Watcher, another Murphy–Brennan creation, dramatizes a real-life, unsolved stalking case in suburban New Jersey. And American Sports Story, which Murphy executive-produced, portrays the life of NFL star-turned-convicted murderer Aaron Hernandez. (And frankly, some TV viewers might consider the release of Murphy’s All’s Fair its own American crime story…)

Suffice it to say, American Crime Story is on the back burner as Murphy and his collaborators focus on other productions. But who’s to say what they’re dreaming up in an office on some Hollywood backlot? The anthology could stage an American comeback story if its producers land on the right Season 4 idea.