Did he do it?
Considering just how much dinner-party squabbling and talk-radio squawking that question inspired more than 20 years ago, it’s still a little weird that the matter of O.J. Simpson’s guilt or innocence is pretty much a closed case these days. You could bring it up, but really, what’s the point?
After all, even though Simpson was famously acquitted of the 1994 murders of his ex-wife, Nicole, and her friend Ron Goldman, he lost a civil suit just a few years later, then wrote a hypothetical book with the most “OK, OK, you got me!” title ever. (And if that weren’t enough, he's now in jail for a bizarre Las Vegas robbery that feels like a discarded B-plot from The Hangover Part III). Even his few remaining defenders would likely admit he’s guilty of something, and even asking “Did he do it?” today feels an easy punchline—the “Where’s the Beef?” for Clinton-era true-crime enthusiasts.
And as producer Ryan Murphy (Glee, American Horror Story) and screenwriters Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski (Ed Wood, The People vs. Larry Flynt) prove in the new American Crime Story: The People v. O.J. Simpson, the ex-football great’s culpability is one of the least compelling questions to raise about the case. Instead, this crackling 10-part series on FX—which, based on its first six episodes, is just as sleek, star-struck, and unpredictable as its title subject—posits a more compelling query: Why did we spend so much time dwelling solely on the murders themselves, and ignore addressing the numerous 20th-century problems (race, gender, class, celebrity) that Simpson’s trial squeezed to the surface?
Such topics certainly felt second-tier back in the ’90s. For those who watched the entire ordeal on TV—and it was impossible not to, given how it dominated cable debates, tabloid shows, and late-night comedy bits—the Simpson trial was an early indicator of how news would be absorbed in the coming digital era: As an endless frog-plague of raw information and barked wisdom, with little room left for nuance. There were plenty of smart people covering the trial, to be sure, but they were inevitably muted by broadcasters and execs happy to reduce the trial’s key participants to cartoons.
People v. O.J., based on Jeffrey Toobin’s 2007 bestseller The Run of His Life, not only digs deeper into the lives of such unlikely celebrities as Marcia Clark and Johnnie Cochran, it also proves that their experiences and difficulties are just as worthy of sober scrutiny today as they were two decades ago. But don’t worry: People isn't interested in scolding you. This is appropriately juicy stuff, the best kind of high-minded low-brow. Murphy, for all his indulgences, doesn’t do dull, and Alexander and Karaszweski have always reveled in the gonzo moments when public figures transition into pop-culture fixtures, so from the get-go, People v. O.J., hums along with white Bronco-like bravura.
After opening with jittery, still-harrowing footage from L.A.'s back-to-back early-‘90s nightmares—the beating of Rodney King by a quartet of white LAPD officers, and the riots that followed the four men’s acquittal in 1992—we see Simpson (played by Cuba Gooding Jr.) emerge calmly from his mansion on the night of the murders, greeting his driver with a forced smile and a lame excuse (he’d overslept, he says, and needed to take a shower).
In the subsequent ride to the airport, Simpson tells the driver about his childhood encounter with Willie Mays—“It made me go, That’s what I want to be when I grow up,” he says—with a sincere smile and a hint of disappointment. It’s the one of the last times we’ll see him in such an introspective mood, as Gooding and the writers wisely opt not to portray Simpson as a tortured martyr, nor as a cunning monster, but instead as a glum gazillionaire whose continual lies (both to himself, and to the world) eventually seem to exhaust him.
Not long after Simpson’s backseat lament, two bodies are discovered at his ex-wife’s upscale home, with the famously blood-stained glove not far away. Soon, a panicky Simpson assembles his team, and *People v. O.J. *reveals its cavalcade-of-stars mini-series ambitions, bringing together as many bold-faced names as it can: David Schwimmer as Juice-loving Robert Kardashian; Nathan Lane as the bon mot-dispensing, booze-sponging defender F. Lee Bailey; and John Travolta as deal-making lawyer Robert Shapiro, sporting eyebrows that look like moldy grape leaves, and occasionally speaking in a clipped, cock-of-the-walk talk that reminded me of the Talking Terl doll I have stashed in my parent’s attic.
By the end of the first episode, Simpson and A.C. Cowlings (hey, look, it’s Malcolm-Jamal Warner!) are roaring down an L.A. freeway, and district attorney (a peeved and permed Sarah Paulson) is watching her suspect cruise into the sunset—along with her career. “We’re going to look like morons,” she says, not inaccurately.
If *People *had merely devolved from there into a shallow, nostalgia-stoking joyride down a hero’s decline, no one would have complained. But as the series goes on, it gets savvier: Simpson fades from view, and focus zooms in on our two secret leads: Clark and Cochran (Courtney B. Vance), smart adversaries whom the media turned into pop-culture caricatures, but whose lives are re-examined here with empathy and warts-and-all affection.
They also happen to be vessels for the filmmakers to address some of the unspoken (or simply not understood) social inequities and outrages that percolated beneath the Simpson trial—starting, of course, with race. *People *may open with those forceful shots of Rodney King and the riots, but it also skillfully introduces day-to-day examples of the damaged relationship between African-Americans and the LAPD, and the resentments that resulted. In the series’ most excruciating scene (and one of its few flashbacks) we watch an earlier-in-his-career Cochran get pulled over while taking his two daughters to dinner in a tony, all-white neighborhood. As their father is bent over the hood of his car, Cochran’s kids watch not with fear, but with a look of resigned sadness; they’re all used to this by now.
Such moments provide both a context and a subtext for People, especially in the scenes featuring Cochran. To those who saw him on CNN in the ’90s, he came off as a grandstanding, spotlight-seeking Cheshire cat. *People *captures that, thanks in no small part to Vance’s drone-precise, exuberantly physical performance; in one scene, Cochran seduces his wife by practicing his court statements while strutting around their bedroom, his delivery as smooth as his robe.
But it also depicts the oft-spoofed attorney (who died in 2005) as a shrewd power player—“the world needs more black men willing to make a difference,” he tells Christopher Darden (Sterling K. Brown) in a self-flattering pep talk—and as a man chagrined after witnessing years of police abuse first-hand. While Vance’s Cochran might see a chance for personal glory in the Simpson case, he also senses an opportunity to give voice to the simmering resentments (all still relevant today) that caused so many to question the LAPD's motivations in Simpson’s arrest.
Clark’s story gets an equally essential reconsideration. Wading through a nasty divorce, and offended by Simpson’s seeming inability to keep his story straight, she free-dives into her work, despite often feeling like she’s surrounded by frickin’ idiots. Paulson zeroes in on the D.A.'s chagrined, cigarette-sneaking frustration, but also plays up the coy charms of a woman who keeps a Jim Morrison poster on her wall, stores bottles of booze in her desk, and tells a colleague that trials are "better than sex." In People's early episodes, Clark is a self-assured dynamo, eager to put Simpson away.
But when the trial turns her into a celebrity—one whose hairstyles and wardrobe choices are mocked by a crow’s chorus of on-air commentators—Clark’s story takes on a sad timelessness: The misogynistic pile-on she experiences could just as easily happen to any powerful, public woman in 2016. At one point, after hearing yet another snicker about her appearance, she turns to her hairdresser for a “softer” look. (“The only thing you need to be," he tells her, "is the best version of yourself.") Her makeover scene, set to Seal’s “Kiss from a Rose,” finds Clark smiling with happy relief; but when she shows up the next day in court, to gasps and chortles from her mostly male colleagues, she understandably loses her composure. Clearly, no matter *what *version of herself she presents, it still won’t be enough for them to take her seriously.
Nowadays, Clark would find advocates all over the internet; back then, though, even with her slights in plain sight, few were eager to stick up for her. But *People v. O.J. *rises to her defense. In fact, it finds itself quietly relating to nearly all of its supporting players: Darden, burdened by both his own self-appointed pressures, and the expectations of the African-American community; Kardashian, ill at-ease with his family’s eager embrace of his new celebrity; and even the blowhardy Shapiro, a middle-aged lion slow to realize that Cochran’s pushing him to the sidelines of his own team.
*People v. O.J. *doesn’t turn any of them into heroes, but at least it questions, and maybe corrects, the versions of them we thought we knew 20 years ago, when the media (and our own need for surface-level satisfactions) downgraded them them to IRL soap-stars. It’s both an apology for, and a celebration of, television—a time-tripping corrective that uses a format from the ’70s to tell a story of the ‘90s that illuminates the still-potent social crises of the ’00s. Maybe this time, we’ll all watch a little bit closer.
