American Crime Story: The People Vs. O.J Simpson Offers Ten Hours of Tabloid Delight

I have a theory that the eighteenth year of your life is the most important. It’s the year when you’re most alive. It’s the magical annum when you graduate from childhood and adolescence and high school and become yourself. It’s consequently an object of intense nostalgia. You don’t pine for anything like you pine for what rocked your world when you were eighteen years old.

I turned eighteen in 1994. In a deeply non-coincidental turn of events, I am currently in the process of writing a fifty-two part tribute to the films of 1994 that kicked off with Cabin Boy. I have plenty of evidence to support my contention that 1994 was one of the greatest years in film history but on an emotional level part of the reason that year will always mean so much to me was because I was eighteen then and that year somehow feels more important than all of the others.

It’s no exaggeration to say that O.J Simpson trial was my generation’s Kennedy assassination. The vicious murder of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman is a crime that defined a generation and it happened on June 12th, 1994. That was the awful day that everything changed not just for the Simpson and Brown familes but for the country as a whole.

The aftermath of that tragedy would rivet the country and the world. It would become the biggest story in the country for months and months. It was unmistakably a tabloid tale full of sex, jealousy, wealth, race, money, fame, success, abuse, drugs and ultimately murder.

It’s a story with enormous, almost uncanny personal relevance. As relaid in my memoir The Big Rewind I pulled a voucher for an O.J Simpson autograph worth hundreds of dollars out of a pack of cards that resulted directly in the firing of the man who ran the group home where I grew up and who I viewed as a second father. Then, on my graduation night I sat glumly at the Gold Coin diner in Evanston and watched perplexedly as every television in the joint showed a White Ford Bronco traveling down a highway in a leisurely fashion while being pursued by a phalanx of cop cars.

“What is that?” I asked someone behind the counter. “It’s O.J. He’s in that White Ford Bronco and he’s got a gun to his head and he’s threatening to kill himself.” the filthy, probably illiterate grill-master replied.

That blew my mind. I still held onto an image of O.J as a wholesome football hero who starred in the Naked Gun movies and smiled his way through commercials and a TV announcing gig. I couldn’t wrap my mind around the idea that people thought he murdered his wife so now he now he was threatening to blow his head off if the cops didn’t leave him alone.

What’s next? Was freaking Bill Cosby going to be exposed as a serial rapist? Was anything sacred? What can you trust if not a celebrity’s publicist-honed squeaky clean public image? It was utterly disillusioning for a child of the 1980s.

I was so fascinated by O.J that I read his faux-confession If I Did It and watched and wrote about his poorly received prank video Juiced. That led indirectly to marriage and fatherhood for me but that’s a story for another time. What’s important is that it’s almost impossible to overstate the role O.J Simpson’s case played in my life at, just as it’s hard to overstate the case’s cultural and pop cultural significance.

That’s one of the many things Ryan Murphy, Scott Alexander and Larry Karszewski’s wildly entertaining true-crime mini-series American Crime Story: The People Vs. O.J Simpson does right. It captures how this salacious story took over our national discourse for an ungodly amount of time and split our nation, once again, along racial lines, with white America overwhelmingly thinking Simpson guilty but a sizable percentage of African-Africans feeling he was framed by racist cops.

American Crime Story casts Cuba Gooding Jr. as O.J Simpson in a performance that I still cannot quite decide whether is good, bad or good in the sense that Gooding Jr. very convincingly plays Simpson as someone who is a terrible actor in multiple ways. He’s not exactly Laurence Olivier when he acts in movies but he’s even worse at convincing his lawyers and the world that he most assuredly did not butcher his ex-wife and Ronald Goldman and that, if cleared, he would devote the rest of his life to tracking down the fabled “real killers” of his wife and Goldman.

If I might give a little spoiler here, the “real killers” were never found. O.J, honestly, didn’t seem to have put a whole lot of time or effort into tracking down the real killers, which I find surprising except that some people actually still think that he’s guilty despite being found innocent in a court of law.

Gooding Jr.’s Simpson is all flashy surfaces because the NFL legend and probable double murderer was all about maintaining a smiling, appealing exterior to hide the abuser within. He tries to hold onto the persona a racist American public fell in love with even after the ultimate fall from grace.

John Travolta, who also produced, delivers one of his most entertaining performances of the past twenty years as Robert Shapiro, the legal shark who helped assemble the famous legal “Dream Team” for O.J. only to be pushed aside by Courtney B. Vance’s Johnnie Cochran because the optics are better for Simpson to be represented by a black man but also because Cochran is a much better lawyer and much sharper character than Shapiro.

Lawyers are really just actors whose theater is a courtroom and whose job is to manipulate the emotions of a judge and/or jury rather than a paying audience. That makes Travolta perfect for barristers because he is so innately in touch with his inner ham. I very much enjoyed Travolta’s performance here, just as I enjoyed all of the performances despite Travolta looking nothing like Shapiro, delivering many of his lines as if he just sucked on a lemon and giving the character flashes of Terl, the nine foot tall Psychlo Travolta unforgettably played in Battlefield Earth when he gets angry.

Thanks in no small part to Seinfeld, Cochran will be remembered as a flashy, show-boating entertainer who got a man guilty of murderer off through cynical manipulation, theatrics and shameless plays to emotion and racial resentment. People Versus O.J Simpson argues that Cochran was a strutting, swaggering peacock in public but privately he was a man of substance and integrity, a leader who genuinely cared about his community and race and felt he could genuinely serve them by keeping a famous, powerful black man out of jail.

Cochran is such a formidable force for good when he wants to be that he has the respect and admiration of Christopher Darden (Stirling K. Brown), a black attorney working for the prosecution. People Versus O.J Simpson proved a star-making role for Brown, who more than holds his own with an impossibly star-studded cast and has such explosive chemistry with Sarah Paulson’s Marcia Clark that you really want those crazy kids to get together because they seem so right for each other.

I had a weird grudge against Paulson for Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip’s relentless insistence that she was playing the most talented performer in the history of the universe and you’re a hopeless half-wit if you think otherwise.

The People Versus O.J Simpson establishes, however, that Paulson really is that talented. She really is an extraordinary performer who can be funny and relatable and utterly captivating in the right role. Like every other role in the mini-series, this is an impossibly juicy one cleverly written and impeccably performed.

Nathan Lane is cast savvily against type as superstar lawyer F. Lee Bailey, just one of a slew of big old swinging dicks volleying madly for position and dominance while David Schwimmer plays Robert Kardashian as a true believer who genuinely thought that his good friend O.J Simpson couldn’t possibly be guilty of the hideous crimes he was accused of until reality and the evidence makes that damn near impossible.

It’s a very physical performance. Kardashian’s evolution from believer to skeptic to non-believer is conveyed almost completely through the expressions on Schwimmer’s expressive face rather than through dialogue.

The People Versus O.J Simpson is so loaded with melodrama, comedy, humanity and incident that I kind of wish they’d followed it with a series of spin-offs for scene-stealing characters like Connie Britton party girl Faye Resnick, who shows up just long enough to bewitch us and usher us into a world of sin, sex and sensationalism, then leaves shortly afterwards.

It’s full of actors who make a very big impression with a minimum of screentime, like Robert Morse as Dominick Dunne, Selma Blair as Kris Jenner and Rob Morrow as Dream Team lawyer Barry Scheck. Scheck is introduced as a DNA wonk who explains just how utterly damning the DNA evidence is but that it can be invalidated by casting doubt on its origins and accuracy. When we next see the lawyer in the courtroom he is a ferocious bulldog hammering away relentlessly at a witness until they seem ready to weep. The dream team had no place for gentleness, only savagery.

If the case came down to the facts, the evidence and the DNA, then Simpson would have been found guilty. That did not prove to be the case, however. The dream team essentially put the LAPD, and more specifically Mark Fuhrman, a detective who played a central role in the case and turned out to have a dark past, in the sense that he was an enthusiastic racist with a particular love for the N word on trial for being racist and definitely not above framing an innocent black man. That was a case that they could win. That’s ultimately the case that the dream team did win when O.J was found not guilty.

I’m not sure The People Versus O.J Simpson needed ten installments. I’m thinking that they probably could have made due with eight. But the mini-series absolutely flies by. It’s a wonderfully human and American story full of twists and turns and unforgettable characters.

I was a little weary about covering The People Versus O.J Simpson on account of it being ten hours long. I shouldn’t have been. It’s very, very long but it feels very short.

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