The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story tells its story, beginning to end, without much surprise. From its cast to its subject-matter to its aggressive promotion on the part of FX, the limited drama screeches “prestige,” playing like a ten-week cultural event in the vein of recent programs such as Fargo, the first season of True Detective or the ending run of Breaking Bad. In generating record ratings and unprecedented critical acclaim for a network not exactly short on success, it lives up to the hype – on its face, the series doesn’t take any risks; when picked apart, it’s hard to find a single flaw – as reliably excellent television. That’s a more important and radical distinction than many have acknowledged. Indeed, through its robust engagement with a range of thorny issues, The People v. O.J. Simpson provides a vibrant update on the Golden Age of Television’s most foundational product: the prestige drama series.
The engrossing elements of O.J., a closed-ended anthology, are rooted in its source material – the 1995 trial of O.J. Simpson, charged for the murder of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her acquaintance Ron Goodman, drew such fanfare, and was so rich with outrageous events, that head writers Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski never seem to lack for juicy content. That creative roadmap is the series’ primary advantage: as they seamlessly speed through the case, Alexander and Karaszewski offer meaningful perspectives and focuses to guide their particular narrative. This includes varying episodic centerpieces, textured by powerful themes – among those who receive this treatment are rattled prosecutor Marcia Clark (Sarah Paulson), flamboyant defense attorney Johnnie Cochran (Courtney V. Vance) and the jury, a majority-black group of citizens whose lives are put indefinitely on hold to enact “justice” – and the establishment of interpersonal dynamics that intriguingly build to the trial’s most infamous moments.
Such a character-based approach invokes new sympathy for the long-lambasted prosecution team of Clark and Chris Darden (Sterling K. Brown). It reveals the hypocrisy of Cochran, a man as capable of bringing racial injustice to the fore of public discourse as he was, likely, of beating his own wife. It tracks, humanely but with good humor, how Simpson’s most strident legal advocates, Robert Shapiro (John Travolta, also a producer) and Rob Kardashian (David Schwimmer), turned sour on their participation and, at least in the latter’s case, on the defendant himself. This does not just make for smart, complicated storytelling. As envisioned by Ryan Murphy and his team of writers, O.J. provides a cathartic re-imagining that, perhaps, only elevates the actual events’ significance.
In many ways, this is due to the performances – an apt reason for success here, seeing as the original trial was all but defined by its animated personalities, right down to minor players like Faye Resnick (played here by a deliciously against-type Connie Britton). Paulson is distinctly blistering; the mockeries of Marcia Clark to follow the trial, running from the late ‘90s all the way to last year’s Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, receive crackling condemnation in the form of her portrayer’s harrowingly empathetic performance. Paulson’s creation feels iconic, even, as she spins Marcia’s chain-smoking, legal eloquence and disarming flirtatiousness with a certain feminist audacity. That progressive power complements and contrasts with Vance, whose voracious appetite for Cochran’s talky brilliance leads to a string of monologues propelled by lyrical hyperbole. The two actors establish an infectious push-and-pull between the realistically grounded and sensationally elevated, one that reflects the central conflict of the original case, and that also sets the template for the supporting cast – for the subtle turns from Brown and Schwimmer, and for the fascinatingly assembled work of Travolta and Britton. (Oddly, the one piece of genuine miscasting seems to be Cuba Gooding Jr., as O.J. himself; while the performance is strong, it lacks the menacing arrogance that Simpson notoriously projected as the case rolled on.)
Standout acting, clever writing, tight structuring – these are staples of quality television drama. Where O.J. sets itself apart is in its politics – in the embrace of the messy and complex, in the dynamism of its characters who each, intentionally or not, came to assume symbolic places relative to race, power and gender. Alexander and Karaszewski pinpoint the clear and justified anger within the black community – the series even opens on the Rodney King riots – as a way to sensitively explore how the case tangentially came to center on institutional racism, and specifically on racist cop Mark Fuhrman (Steven Pasquale). On Marcia Clark, the writers keenly reveal the double-standards and media mistreatment she was subjected to; it’s familiar in a present-day context, rendering the lack of acknowledgment within the series’ world that much more dramatically potent. On Chris Darden, they provocatively identify the role of a black man increasingly appearing as if he were up against the black community; his line,“You wanted a black face, but you didn’t want a black voice,” spoken to Marcia (who didn’t listen to him in regards to putting Fuhrman on the stand), explodes with resonance. And as they depict Cochran sobbing, as he realizes that his message of police brutality has finally gone mainstream, a challenging truth becomes clear: this was a case that meant two completely different things to its two sides, with each perspective made equally understandable, poignant even, within the series’ contours. A guilty man may have walked free – but here became a media circus, illuminating far broader ideas and opportunities.
Murphy, the series’ principal director, captures that circus – the cameras swirling the courtroom, the lens habitually zooming in and zooming out, ever in motion, continually in action. The People v. O.J. Simpson is of such relentless energy that its intellectual depth never risks dominating. The entertainment factor is prodigious; it casts too compelling and unusual a spell, from Travolta's off-putting-then-enjoyable-then-endearing schtick, to Schwimmer's frequent and irony-free utterances of Juice (O.J.'s nickname), to be successfully withstood. And yet that also seems entirely the point. This is far from moody, reflective true crime drama, after all: the subject matter wouldn’t allow it, and Murphy, genre-experimenter that he is, would never have any interest in it. O.J. is, like its source material, campy fun supplanted by evocative tragedy. For a show of such polish and consistency, that confluence makes for an uneasy balance. And its brilliant execution, in so directly documenting the case’s foreshadowing of present-day controversies, should not be discounted as a result. By embracing the crazy, The People v. O.J. Simpson adheres to the essential principle of any judicial process: it tells the truth.
Grade: A