February 8 & 15, 2016 Issue
Not-Guilty Pleasure
The calculations of "American Crime Story: The People vs. O. J. Simpson."
The series feels hot-wired with modern parallels, extending beyond the Simpson case.
Illustration by Owen Freeman
"We are Kardashians," Robert Kardashian (David Schwimmer) tells his four children, who bounce in a booth at L.A.'s ChinChin restaurant, giddy that their dad has been recognized from his appearances on cable news, sticking up for his friend O. J. Simpson. "And in this family being a good person and a loyal friend is more important than being famous. Fame is fleeting. It's hollow. It means nothing at all without a virtuous heart."
Is there a force more caustic, and more propulsive, than mere irony? If so, that's the substance flowing through "American Crime Story: The People vs. O. J. Simpson," on FX, an addictive, miraculously well-cast dramatization of the 1995 murder case, created by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, and produced by Ryan Murphy and his longtime production partner Brad Falchuk, among others. The series, like the book it's based on—"The Run of His Life," from 1997, by my colleague Jeffrey Toobin—is unambiguous about Simpson's guilt in the murder of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend Ron Goldman. But this is no dutiful nineties period piece (and, yes, I know that's a horrifying phrase, whatever your age). Instead, the series feels hot-wired with modern parallels, which extend far beyond those baby Kardashians. Without ever mentioning the links, the creators evoke the Cosby scandal and Black Lives Matter, the debate about Hillary's "likability" and Obama's legacy, the rise of reality TV and the expansion of cable news. It's a tasty Proustian cronut that makes you remember the events of not only 1995 but 2015.
As one might expect of a Ryan Murphy production, particularly one done in collaboration with the writers of "Ed Wood," "American Crime Story" is filled with dark humor, including a few camp touches. The show's poster depicts O.J. with his hands, one wearing the notorious leather glove, over his eyes. The sixth episode is titled "Marcia Marcia Marcia." The Beastie Boys' "Sabotage" pounds over the Bronco chase, L.L. Cool J's "Mama Said Knock You Out" over the not-guilty plea. Yet the series is not, in the first six episodes sent to critics, crude or cartoonish but ideologically and emotionally nuanced, with each episode providing a shift in perspective, as if turning a daisy wheel of empathy. This is in contrast with the more brutalist style of the book, which ripples with disgust at the players' cynicism. ("Shamelessness is a moral, rather than a legal, concept," Toobin writes, in a typical parenthetical.) In a signature move, the creators have turned Robert Kardashian, a sycophantic dope in Toobin's telling, into a near-hero, a gloomy Sancho Panza with Christian faith. Yes, his close friend was a homicidal narcissist. But, when you commit a double murder, Kardashian (as equipped with Schwimmer's hangdog Ross Geller gaze) is definitely the guy you'll want by your side, baffled when you flunk the polygraph test.
Murphy and his collaborators strip the story to its elements, from the time that the bloody-footed Akita dragged a neighbor over to the corpses of Brown Simpson, who had been nearly decapitated, and Goldman, stabbed multiple times. Visually, the show is pure Los Angeles, bright and dynamic, with the cameras observing with amused theatricality the pomp of elaborate L.A. houses, their kitchen islands as big as Mustique. The series' real strength, however, is its panoply of eccentric, and almost universally delightful, performances. The most outrageous of these is by John Travolta, as the litigator Robert Shapiro, one of the few characters who come in for a real beating. Travolta plays Shapiro as an Easter Island head of fatuousness, with Spock eyebrows and pursed lips, trailing famous names like bread crumbs. Connie Britton shoplifts scenes as Nicole's friend Faye Resnick, drawling her first line like an aria of decadence: "She was my personal angel. I wouldn't have gone to rehab if it weren't for her." As Simpson, Cuba Gooding, Jr., captures the football star's gasbag egotism but falls short of the regal charisma that drew people to him. Less showy performers hit their mark harder, especially Steven Pasquale as a terrifyingly self-controlled Detective Mark Fuhrman, all "yes, ma'am" and bigotry behind the eyes.
Still, the heart of "American Crime Story" is its daring humanization of a trio of lawyers who were so filleted in the media that they're now remembered primarily in satirical form, through imitations on "Seinfeld" and late-night TV: the prosecutors Marcia Clark (the one with the haircut) and Christopher Darden (who made O.J. try on the bloody glove in court), and the defense attorney Johnnie Cochran ("If it doesn't fit, you must acquit"). On "American Horror Story," Murphy's other anthology series, Sarah Paulson has a diva-glam intensity, but her Marcia Clark is a more life-size figure, vulnerable beneath her matte lipstick and beauty mark. A fiery advocate for victims of domestic violence, Clark is guilty less of arrogance than of excessive purism: she's so certain she's got the goods on O.J. that she keeps taking the higher ground, dumping key witnesses when they make deals with tabloids and refusing to cut jurors based on race, even when her consultant warns her that black women hate her. As the case drags on, Clark's confidence crumbles, degraded by tabloid gossip about her looks, her sex life, her divorce, and her child-custody battle. In one pungent sequence, Clark gets that famously awful haircut, then drifts past a firing squad of gawkers, like Carrie at the prom, as her face quivers with recognition that she's become a dirty joke. She longs to be an avenging angel, but the world sees only a dowdy bitch.
Courtney B. Vance gives a layered, subtle performance as the master showman Johnnie Cochran, Clark's most powerful antagonist—a quiet take on a bold man. My memories of Cochran are of a huckster, a preacherly clown, like "Seinfeld" 's Jackie Chiles. In the book, Toobin portrays him as brilliant but also monstrous, a strategist who could work racial aggrievement into a plate of cookies. The show grants him more gravitas, mainly by emphasizing the complex intersection of his private and public selves. There's a flashback to Cochran getting pulled over by the cops, with his daughters in the car, for driving in a white neighborhood. He's as much an observer as he is a talker, standing back as the "dream team" snipes at one another like the Real Litigators of Beverly Hills. Cochran is a master of code-switching, when it comes to the media: he dismisses the Simpson case as "a loser" to a producer, then unctuously offers sympathy when the cameras blink on.
But it's clear that, like Clark, Cochran wants justice, except from a different angle. Police brutality is not an abstraction to him; from a certain perspective, any force that hires a cop as dirty as Fuhrman has basically framed itself. Some of the best scenes take place in Cochran's mansion, where he and his wife relax, freed from the eyes of white people, making sexy jokes and polishing his banter. "A blunders-in-blue operation," he suggests, and then, frowning, hits on a better phrase: "Contaminated. Compromised. And corrupted!" "Oh, baby," his wife says, laughing. "That's it! That is it. Mmm-hmm. It has a flow, honey." Alone among the ensemble, Cochran enjoys the greatest power of all: he knows exactly how to play himself.
From the vantage point of 2016, it is far easier, for a person like me, to understand why Simpson was acquitted (and the case was about nothing if not such demographic calculations). The Rodney King acquittal and the L.A. riots were just three years before; Fuhrman reportedly collected Nazi medals, lied about using racial slurs, and bragged about torturing suspects. Why wouldn't a black jury believe that he planted evidence? It didn't matter that O.J. barely thought of himself as black, or that he'd palled around with cops, hosting them at Brentwood pool parties, or that he had a history of beating Nicole. Identity can function as a game of rock-paper-scissors. In Judge Ito's court, two decades ago, race beat gender.
Many of the sharpest scenes in "American Crime Story" explore the sticky interaction of race, fame, and class. When Clark's boss tells her that they're holding the trial downtown, she cracks, "Doesn't Simpson deserve a jury of his peers? You know, rich, middle-aged white men?" Lawyers on both sides invoke, in sober tones, "the downtown dialect" and "optics," code for skin tone. In one of Cochran's most brilliant manipulations, he stages Simpson's mansion for visiting jurors, removing nude portraits of white girlfriends, subbing in the Heisman trophy and Afrocentric art, along with the Norman Rockwell painting "The Problem We All Live With." ("It's on loan—from the Cochran Collection," he jokes.) A trenchant sequence (directed by John Singleton) features a dinner party that the Vanity Fair journalist Dominick Dunne hosts for his white high-society friends, at which he regales them with seamy tidbits about the case. Midway through one of Dunne's anecdotes, the table goes silent. The waiter has arrived, and he is black.
For all its jauntiness, the show is respectful about the crime, and includes a painful scene involving Goldman's father, who raves, devastated, at how his son has been turned into "a footnote to his own murder." But the creative team's most unusual choice is in pinpointing a less typical object of sympathy: Christopher Darden, the young African-American prosecutor, engaged in a flirtation with his boss, Marcia Clark. As played with gentle warmth by Sterling K. Brown, Darden lacks both Clark's righteousness and Cochran's canny control. When he's promoted for his "optics," he becomes perfect prey for Cochran's mind games, then gets cast in the press as an Uncle Tom. In one confrontation, the lawyers clash over whether the N-word should be allowed on the stand. Only after Cochran has shredded Darden's argument does he murmur an aside, one that only his opponent can hear: "Nigga, please." In Darden's failures, "American Crime Story" finds not incompetence but a buried tragedy, about the confines of identity and the isolation of being forced to pick a team, then stick with it, at any cost. He'd be an invisible man, if it weren't for all the cameras. ♦
This article appears in the print edition of the February 8 & 15, 2016, issue.
Emily Nussbaum, The New Yorker's television critic, won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for criticism. Her anthology, "I Like to Watch: Arguing My Way Through the TV Revolution," was released in June.
American Crime Story: The People vs. OJ
Never miss a big New Yorker story again. Sign up for This Week's Issue and get an e-mail every week with the stories you have to read.
American Chronicles
Kicked Off the Land
By Lizzie Presser
Annals of Law
The Danger of the Bloody-Glove Defense
How O. J. Simpson's defense team mounted a theory of police conspiracy—and turned his case into a civil-rights melodrama.
By Jeffrey Toobin
Annals of Race
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man
The O. J. Simpson verdict, judged by a different kind of jury—one made up of black cultural leaders.
By Henry Louis Gates, Jr.