I don’t remember the details of the tales of OJ being depicted so vividly in American Crime Story: The People v. O. J. Simpson. I remember the Bronco chase, but probably as much from coverage after the fact as at the time. I remember the trial going on and on in its soap opera way, but not much concrete – probably because I was deliberately avoiding it. I have no interest in reality TV or TV reality, I just don’t even want to see it. What I do remember is that the general opinion around me was that probably it was all true: that he did it and that the cops had monkeyed with the evidence. And what I don’t remember at all is OJ.
I have no idea how accurate this show is, how much what we see is like what “really happened”. It seems realistic but then that’s their job. But in the story they’re telling, what immediately strikes now, watching it from 2016, is the depth of Johnnie Cochran, his gravity as a person and the deadly serious business of the work he did. As a peripheral spectator, I only saw the showboat. The writers and Courtney Vance do an amazing job of showing us the man who has seen so many terrible things.
The same with Sarah Paulson as Marcia Clark – how at the same time as she has her particular blind spots, she never stops seeing the bottom line truth: two people, slaughtered in rage.
Really, the whole cast is superb, even CGI John Travolta. (Again, no idea how true to life, but boy have I known people like the one he’s portraying…) In a way, though, the most difficult job is Cuba Gooding Jr.’s, because as written, OJ is just … not there. He can’t, or won’t, deal with any of it. He acts like it’s not even real. Nobody wants to have to talk to him. Well, except Bob Kardovian or whoever he is. Everything is projected on to him, nothing is underneath the projections. If they could have legally tried him under a different name, in some completely different town, well. But then they only even came to suspect him because he was the famous Orenthal J Simpson, and they had to go tell him in person.
And then in Episode 4 we get a small reminder of what’s not a projection, what’s not a circus, in the pure volcanic rage of Joseph Siravo’s Fred Goldman, father of the dead delivery boy or cocaine smuggler or gigolo or whatever awful caricature people used, instead of seeing his real son, his dead son. It’s crushing.
A stray thought: listening to OJ strangling his football team metaphor, I began to wonder – are we seeing a prequel to Concussion? I have no idea if this has ever been suggested, but I wonder. Could he really have been such a barely-there sketch of a person all along? It seems unlikely.
In a way I’m reminded of Manhattan – we all know how it turns out, but they’re making it riveting to watch anyway. On to the trial!