100 Favorite Shows: #44 — American Crime Story: The People v. O.J. Simpson
“We’ve been hired to defend a client, not to burn down a city!”
[Disclaimer: Cuba Gooding, Jr., who starred as O.J. Simpson on the series, has been accused of sexual assault against multiple women. The New York Times has the full story, which was originally published in October 2019.]
Ryan Murphy had been steadily building his television empire for years through network phenomenons like Glee and cable anthology series like American Horror Story when he attached his producing talents to FX’s big budget true crime show, American Crime Story. The highly anticipated first season of the show was developed by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski from Jeffrey Toobin’s book, The Run of His Life: The People v. O.J. Simpson. Borrowing the title, ACS’ first season was The People v. O.J. Simpson and it starred Cuba Gooding, Jr. in the title role. Airing in 2016, the series came after the twentieth anniversary of the “Trial of the Century” and it remains one of FX’s most impressive single seasons of television ever. For season two, Tom Rob Smith took over 2018’s The Assassination of Gianni Versace, starring Édgar Ramírez, Daren Criss, Ricky Martin, Penélope Cruz, and Mike Farrell. An upcoming third season will center around Bill Clinton’s impeachment, but for now, the O.J. season remains one of the most fully-realized arcs of television of the 2010s.
(This essay contains spoilers for the first season of American Crime Story. If you somehow don’t know anything about the O.J. Simpson trial, I would suggest maybe keeping it that way.)
There is a recurring bit on Late Night with Seth Meyers entitled, “What Does Millennial Writer Karen Chee Know?” Essentially, it sees Meyers and Chee showcasing relics of their generations and asking one another if they know what it is. It’s a delightful segment, especially because of how warm Seth’s questions are and how personable Karen is. In one segment from last December, Seth presented an image of Kato Kaelin (played on this series by Billy Magnussen) and Karen Chee had no idea who he was. It’s understandable, though. After all, Kato’s fame was a flash-in-time and solely connected to his status as a witness on a trial that was always finite.
Karen Chee is only three years older than me and, like her, I had no idea who Kato Kaelin was. That is, until I watched The People v. O.J. Simpson on FX and I became enamored with the conception of Kato, just as the entire nation did twenty-five years ago. A surfer bro who seemed as unable to grasp what O.J. had done as Rob Gronkowski was when struggling to understand Aaron Hernandez’s crimes, Kato delighted me when he turned up on screen. I immediately dove deep into his background and legacy in the real world.
In that sense, Kato Kaelin was emblematic of what I loved the most about the O.J. show five years ago (Jesus, time is a son of a bitch). It was introducing a global phenomenon to me, a youth, because I’d only known O.J. Simpson to be a murderer who got off, rather than knowing the barrage of insanity that went into his initial car chase and lengthy court proceedings. I loved it because I couldn’t believe that everything in the series had actually happened. It seemed like an impossible story, since even just one zeitgeist moment from a trial would be enough to prop up the case as an all-timer. O.J.’s trial had ten? Twenty? Thirty?
I dressed as Kato Kaelin for Halloween that year, but the truth is, Kato was pretty tame when compared to the batshit insanity that unfolded from June 1994 to October 1995. The case had Kato, but it also had gloves, racist cops, suicide notes, oath-breaking, Larry King, tabloids, plot twists, and a completely misguided sense of focus (believe it or not, all this is punctuated with “among other things”). The O.J. series allowed someone like me to learn about “The Trial of the Century,” but it also provided plenty of never-before-learned content (an entire episode dedicated to the perspective of the jury, “A Jury in Jail”) for those who lived during the 1990s and thought they knew everything there was to know.
What grabbed me fiercest in the series was the sensationalized defense team for O.J. Simpson. While the prosecution largely consisted of just two people, Marcia Clark (Sarah Paulson) and Christopher Darden (Sterling K. Brown), O.J.’s defense squad was an assault of nine lawyers, including Robert Shapiro (John Travolta), Johnnie Cochran (Courtney B. Vance), Robert Kardashian (David Schwimmer), F. Lee Bailey (Nathan Lane), and Barry Scheck (Rob Morrow). Because the defense team was comprised of a truly wild combination of a cast (The Birdcage’s Lane, Friends’ Schwimmer, Grease’s Travolta), that’s what I zeroed in on first back in 2016, as opposed to the traditionally capable prosecution.
I was drawn in by the “flashy hotshots” who comprised the “Dream Team,” with endless posturing, a coup of Shapiro (in “100% Not Guilty), and immense swagger. I was awed by the performances (Vance is a standout), confused by them (Travolta’s eyebrows still haunt me), and amused (Schwimmer’s constant terror behind each “Juice!” is bizarrely funny), in equal measure.
While I do think that each delivered solid turns in their famously legal roles (they leaned into the camp and cartoonish nature of some of these crooked villains of the law — like Evan Handler’s Alan Dershowitz — in a manner that was impossibly satisfying for me), there’s no doubt that Paulson and Brown did the best work in the show. In that sense, I became just like the infatuated public of 1995. I focused more on the over-the-top nature of the defense team and ignored the moral strength exuding throughout Paulson and Brown, Clark and Darden. The latter pairing deserved the public support, but the defense team was more media-friendly. It’s a shame, but that’s the way of things in the American public. And clearly, two decades later, I was guilty of it, too! The swagger of Johnnie Cochran just hooks you, man. It’s intoxicating.
The sensational nature of the trial is mirrored in the swirling shooting style of many of the episodes. Quick cuts anchored a camera that swung around the courtroom with a frenzied interest in each comment, however diplomatic. O.J. could have been little more than a courtroom drama staged in a theater and filmed, but thanks to Murphy’s directorial flair (along with John Singleton’s turn in “The Race Card,” a cementing of the issues of race throughout the trial, including the conflicting view of how black women would sympathize on the jury and a bluster of lies as to whether or not a black man’s voice can be recognized over the phone), it brought the story to life.
I dressed as Kato for Halloween, I slapped Travolta’s Shapiro onto my social media profile picture for a couple weeks, and I went all in on the show. I was enamored with the excess of O.J., the fun experienced on a week-to-week basis. But by the end of the series, when the insanity came to a chugging slow, I was reminded that there was nothing funny or cool about the trial. It was an oppressively sad act of injustice. No amount of accented monologues could take away from the fact that Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman were murdered. That’s what the trial was about; that’s what it should have been about; that’s the exact subject it strayed the furthest from.
Such is the nature of sensationalism, after all. My father believes that the downfall of the soap opera came as a consequence of the O.J. trial, which turned the entirety of television into a 24/7 news cycle that sought a new hot button issue to glom onto for one day before it’d be forgotten by the next. (This issue is depicted by a group of mechanics gathered around a miniature television in a scene that sees one remark, “They should bring Kato back on the show, he was so great.” To most, it’s not an actual trial with implications of justice. It’s just another soap opera with iconic guest stars.)
The endless media coverage revolving around the O.J. trial turned the lawyers into, essentially, celebrities. Three years prior to the case, Tom Cruise eviscerated Jack Nicholson in an Aaron Sorkin courtroom for A Few Good Men. Clearly, the public craved drama like that for real. For a brief period in the 1990s, Marcia Clark and Johnnie Cochran were as famous as Tom Cruise because the media was desperate for a tense, emotional monologue that would result in a case-wrapping confession and let the credits roll.
A major difference, however, is that Sorkin never explored a sequel to A Few Good Men, but the American media undoubtedly hoped to milk the O.J. trial for ratings as long as they possibly could. And when it did come to an end, a sequel resulted in the form of reality television, an irrepressible boom that has cascaded across the industry until the present — and likely forever. There’s no Keeping Up with the Kardashians without the O.J. trial. No Judge Judy (which first aired a year after the verdict). No Survivor. It was a Pandora’s box of toxicity in relation to privacy and broadcast storytelling.
Crucially, the media treated the O.J. trial like it was sports because that was the most prominent cultural touchstone regarding O.J. Simpson. Yes, he’d starred opposite Leslie Nielsen a couple times, but he was still primarily regarded as one of the NFL’s greatest running backs. The nature of sports is depicted in O.J., as Simpson seizes the reign of the case after Johnnie botches his interrogation of Rosa Lopez (Peggy Blow), the housekeeper. Gathering his defense team, O.J. states in “Marcia, Marcia, Marcia” that his sports perspective is a crucial piece of the law team’s plan going forward. The moment is depicted like a locker room, as O.J. prepares to lead the team with the case on his unpadded shoulders.
Of course, the sports-style coverage of the case was present before Rosa’s examination, too, as Marcia Clark pleaded with Judge Ito (Kenneth Choi) to keep Rosa’s witness schedule standard, as she believes Johnnie is only trying to “kill her momentum.” After asking a series of pointed questions to Rosa, Marcia departs from the courtroom and reports immediately hound her, asking for a breakdown of her perspective and how she plans to go forward. Her responses are confident and Cochran’s are devoid of substance. They’re the same answers you get from a post-game press conference with Russell Westbrook. The answers don’t have any actual information, but they’re key for the reporters to write their daily stories; they just need a pull quote.
Like sports, the strategy plays are depicted with more bombast than they actually unfolded in real life. Brown’s portrayal of Darden is more dramatic; Gooding’s O.J. is more bewildered and starry-eyed than the stoic, menacing real-life Simpson; Bruce Greenwood’s Gil Garcetti is always on the cusp of shouting, “Get back to work!” The closest portrayal might actually be Choi’s Ito, depicting the judge — on the surface — as a lax antidote to the surrounding chaos. However, it was no secret that Ito loved to ham up his pivotal role in the case for the courtroom cameras (“If you wanna know which way he’ll tilt,” Marcia quips about Ito, “Just watch the talk shows”). As the iconic archival footage is recreated painstakingly by the O.J. team, so too are Ito’s knowing glances to the recorder, as the case slips further away from being a “slam dunk” (or, to use a football term, a goal line touchdown) for the prosecution. Eventually, it became a Hail Mary.
The worst of the media helped make it this way, but it also contributed to the systematic discrediting of Clark and Darden, based on nothing but superficial elements of their character. Clark and Darden were clearly prepared for the case and their mistakes were honest consequences of their trying to take shots that matched Cochran’s cacophonies, rather than slip-ups from their thorough bodies of paperwork and evidence evaluation. Without the ability to slam their casework, the media instead aimed to paint Darden as a traitor to his race (solely for the headlines) and to place Marcia Clark under every lens of scrutiny possible.
To bolster her own confidence, in “Marcia, Marcia, Marcia,” Clark smiles while strutting into a hair salon as Seal’s 1995 hit, “Kiss from a Rose,” cascades across the scene. When she unveils her perm to the courtroom, the song fades away and we hear only the echoing click of her heels against the floor while her expression falls as witnesses, lawyers, and Judge Ito mock her new style. Only in the O.J. trial would Marcia’s appearance take precedence over the actual facts of the case, right? Not quite. Granted, the obsessive reporters blew every small detail out of proportion, but Marcia’s plight is depicted as a microcosm of the higher standards and barriers placed against women who enter into male-dominated fields and threaten their fragile emotional security.
The media scrutinizes her appearance (as if anyone but her should have a say) vastly more than they scrutinize Cochran’s fear tactics, Ito’s conflict of interest, and even the allegations that O.J. Simpson murdered two people. Instead, Marcia’s forced to endure radio polls asking if she’s a “bitch or a babe,” leaked naked photos of herself to tabloids, cashiers personally probing into her purchase of tampons. Throughout the episode, the steadily escalating horrors she endures as her daily life sheds its privacy is depicted excellently on Paulson’s face. Initially, she portrays an aura of belief that confidence might win her over in the case. But she’s not a public personality like O.J. Simpson and Johnnie Cochran and Alan Dershowitz are and she just can’t take the abuse by the episode’s end.
We see Marcia slowly build up her courage during the series’ sixth installment. Bravely, she informs Judge Ito that she’s unable to stay late for a day during the trial because she has to care for her children (forcing her to prove her worth as a mother and as a lawyer, when no other lawyer needed to prove their worth at all). When Cochran makes a crack about her commitment to the case, she speaks up again, knowing that Cochran is already planning to spin Marcia’s defense of her obligations into some sexist diatribe for the magazines to emphasize.
Often, it seems like Clark is alone in her plight. Her ex-husbands press her time allotments, her kids don’t understand the role of her occupation, Garcetti broaches tricky topics of misogyny awkwardly with her. Only Darden is able to provide genuine emotional support behind divvying up the legal obligations of the prosecution. It’s Darden who squeezes her hand, provides a shoulder for her to rest upon, and scrawls a note that he loves her haircut. It’s Darden who encourages Clark to set aside some time for fun and relaxation when they dance to The Isley Brothers’ “Who’s That Lady?”
In the back of her head throughout the dance, Marcia can only think of what the media would say if they saw her neglecting her work to have a three-minute dance with a friend. Larry King, Ito, Cochran, her ex-husband. They’d all jump at the first notion that Marcia Clark was actually having spurts of fun during her challenging work. It’s gutting to watch her balancing act of motherhood and legal pertinence, especially in comparison with everyone else getting a free pass from the media because they’re men. Marcia’s the only one who cries and then she curses herself for crying because she knows the narrative that will spring up and then this only makes her cry more. It’s a viscous, unfair cycle. The angrier others depict her as being, the angrier she becomes (like a much more serious version of Taylor Swift’s “Mad Woman”). Upon my rewatch, I found myself seizing onto the dance scene as firmly as Darden squeezed Clark’s hand when she buried her head in her hands and wept. It was just so important to hold onto the humanity of a woman who’d been simultaneously depicted as an evil witch trying to dismantle the sports hero of many and as the only person preventing a murderer going free.
“Marcia, Marcia, Marcia” is not my favorite episode of the O.J. show (that honor goes to the penultimate, “Manna from Heaven”), but it’s probably the series’ best. Thanks to its depiction of the emotional truth behind the trial’s major players, rather than just an itemized list of the factual “what happened” in the case, the sixth episode proved O.J.’s ability to interrogate massive themes, while still embracing the patented Ryan Murphy campiness.
After all, the word of the trial was absolutely “intersectionality.” The O.J. trial, as one of the staunchest inflection points in the history of American culture, had everything. Sexism, an overbearing media, celebrity status, sports perspectives, and on and on and on. Crucially, the O.J. trial was also embroiled in the precarious discussion of race in America.
As aforementioned, Darden was wrongly seen by some to be betraying the “brotherhood” of black culture by working to prosecute O.J. Simpson. It was one of the many conspiracy narratives Cochran flung at the wall, desperate for buzzwords and headlines to stick over the general courtroom minutiae. The racial balance of the case is obviously depicted in “The Race Card,” which established an origin story for Johnnie Cochran’s relationship with the law. However, “Marcia, Marcia, Marcia” and “Manna from Heaven” are a vital duology for the racial themes in O.J., as well, because they feature the bulk of Mark Fuhrman’s (Steven Pasquale) role in the case.
Cochran positions Fuhrman as a racist cop in the lineage of the 1992 riots in Los Angeles and their causation after tapes of Fuhrman using the N-word, among other racial epithets and violently prejudiced statements, surfaced. Clark does not stray from propping up Fuhrman as a garbage human being, but she’s also hellbent to keep the tapes away from the jury because the implication that he planted evidence at the crime scene in question would dissolve her entire narrative. Today, it might be easy to assume that Marcia Clark would just be another “Karen,” operating against a black man who rose to national prominence. The entire situation seems complicated, but it’s actually not. Multiple things can be true at the same time. The police force in the United States can be a systemically racist institution (it is) and O.J. Simpson can still be a murderer (he probably was).
The purpose of The People v. O.J. Simpson, though, was always to showcase that such subjects were never black and white. Cochran genuinely cares about race-based corruption in the police, but he also has to act as the ringleader of the defense team, spinning conspiracy theories like they’re rings for acrobats to slip past. Cochran has been stopped by police for no reason other than the color of his skin, but he still has his own history of abuse with which the media reckons. Yes, it’s complicated, but as long as there’s a moral compass applied to the case, the shades of gray are easy to delineate.
The truth is, Johnnie Cochran was not the best guy, no matter how much pathos Vance brilliantly infused into the character. In “Manna from Heaven,” Fuhrman’s disgusting tapes are the titular object. Cochran sees the horrific verbiage as a gift from God and, even though he has a point, he’s just using the tapes to get his client off. Cochran hardly seems interested in shaping the nation outside of his myriad conspiracy theories. (Not that it’s on Johnnie Cochran to root out centuries of racism, mind you.) To him, the O.J. trial was immediately about more than just a murder and he was determined to convince the public of the same. It’s “what black people have always known,” Cochran references about Fuhrman when he seeks the use of tapes while in “Dixie” with F. Lee Bailey, who acknowledges the statues of Confederate soldiers and the smell of “Mint Juleps and condescension.” But that’s just it. He’s only using it and Cochran’s behavior reeks of insincerity.
This “smoking gun” for the entire nation that Cochran abuses beyond all reason is what eventually prompts Darden’s outburst in “Manna from Heaven.” The toxic hypocrisy was too much for Darden to bear as he lambastes Cochran’s obsession with turning the case into a money-grab, a referendum, a “circus.”
Yes, the prosecution despises Fuhrman’s policeman-esque ability to falsify reports (“It takes a man of certain character to be hated by both sides,” Bailey quips when Fuhrman marches through the courtroom to plead the fifth at the climax of the episode), but Marcia still begs Ito “from [her soul]” to withhold the racist tapes from the jury. It’s an impassioned plea that makes logical sense, right alongside Darden’s fury of Cochran’s lies, but it’s the exact amount of pathos that the defense team preys upon.
Throughout the O.J. show, Cochran is depicted as (albeit, wisely) a man building a narrative and excavating the world for pieces to fit into it. He’s a man who is doing his best to persuade the jury to vote emotionally. It’s absolutely twisted the ways in which he feasts upon the sincere morals of Clark and Darden. They’re a pair who apologize to one another and support each other with hand-holding (while the defense conjures up a plethora of ego battles) and it’s this heartful investment Clark and Darden have in seeing justice that Cochran sees as their weakness.
Both cases are shown to be precarious and marked by high tensions (when Cochran expresses his desire to “turn up the pressure,” Shapiro shoots back, “This city is about to explode! We have enough pressure!”), but Cochran has no limit to how low he will stoop and that’s what ultimately provides him the advantage over the prosecution. It’s a soap opera narrative Cochran seeks and it’s a gripping, twisty-turny story that unfolds from the trial — to the point where the O.J. series had to be based on a true crime case because it would’ve been too unbelievable otherwise. (Like when Fuhrman’s tapes evoke Judge Ito’s wife and threaten a mistrial, to which Dominick Dunne (Robert Morse), bemoans, “You couldn’t get away with this plot twist in an airport paperback.”)
Intrinsically, the strength of Cochran’s case was in its storytelling capacity. “People like stories,” Darden says, reminding Clark of her one, non-stereotypical weakness against Cochran. “It helps them make sense of things.” Cochran created a story for the jury to believe, leading them to his desired conclusion gradually, in tandem with O.J. Simpson’s own ability to pick up on legal strategies over time. The facts only get you so far in the “Trial of the Century.” Narrative-building is what set the two sides apart.
The only one on the defense side who seems to struggle with buying into Cochran’s narrative is Kardashian. Granted, Cochran, Bailey, and other lawyers seem pretty convinced of O.J.’s guilt when they’re not in the same room as him. But Kardashian is the only one genuinely bothered by it. Ironically, considering the reality TV future of his family, Kardashian is the one who wants to avoid the circus that would come with living through another trial, following a potential Ito-related mistrial. Initially, he was only concerned with the deaths of his friends and the imprisonment of his closest friend. As he sees O.J. and Cochran build a case based on technicalities over truths, Kardashian becomes disillusioned (Schwimmer dials up the weepiness to expert emotional effect) and removed from the sideshow entirely by the time of “The Verdict.” The O.J. Simpson who was his friend died the night that Nicole and Ron died. It just took an exceptionally long time for Karadashian to realize it.
Whether it’s a workout video, a stay in a guest room from a glorified Point Break character, or “manna from heaven” recordings of disgusting police-sanctioned racism, the key facts of the O.J. trial shadowed (and continue to follow) its participants for their lives after the “not guilty” verdict. It doesn’t matter if the stories told in the trial were lies, after all. The narratives don’t just go away cleanly when the jury makes one decision. There’s still shades of nuance to see in them years later, as evidenced by a 2016 miniseries that had a surprising amount to say about a decades-old case.
Throughout, the O.J. show was intensely riveting, even in spite of the famed, known outcome. It never was about the fact of O.J. Simpson’s officially-stated innocence. It was about why the ruling was so, how we got there, and where we went afterwards. The families of Nicole and Ron may have never received the justice they so richly deserved, but the 2016 series dismantled the mythos behind Simpson and rehabilitated the wrongfully assassinated characters of Clark and Darden. It’s not a lot, but it is a win, if you look at things in sports terms. As we saw across ten episodes, the sports terms of the case might have been the only aspects that made any sense. You just can’t treat murder with reason, after all. That narrative never plays.
