American Crime Story Season 1 Episode 1
I really don’t remember much about the O.J. Simpson trial. I was not even six when the bodies of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman were discovered. I seem to have a strong memory of watching the infamous police chase of the white Bronco, but it’s just as likely that instead of tuning in live, I saw it later, on a clip show like I Love the ’90s. The pilot episode of what looks to be a compelling first season of American Crime Story (there’s already a second one in the works about Hurricane Katrina) establishes this civil unrest, the atmosphere of police bias against black people, as a frame before we even meet O.J. (Cuba Gooding Jr.). The series is based on Jeffrey Toobin’s The Run of His Life: The People v. O.J. Simpson, which in turn draws from his reporting for The New Yorker at the time–that is to say, his focus on how pervasive race was to both the trial and the crime itself. What seems to have many reviewers and TV viewers relieved is that Murphy didn’t write any of the episodes. The screenwriting team of Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski (Big Eyes) penned the pilot and several other installments. Instead, Murphy handled directing, and brought in some of the, shall we say, juicier parts, especially in the casting. Toobin’s reporting gave him unprecedented access to prosecutors, defense attorneys, Simpson’s entourage, even the dog walkers–Murphy accurately depicts those many complicated, overlapping microcosms here. And there’s Gooding’s performance as O.J. himself, which is delightfully (I feel morbid for saying it, but) uneven. Over the course of just one episode, we watch him go from the kind of celebrity who is somewhat wearied by his busy life to a man thrown alive to the piranhas. The media, which he is used to in a very particular context, has already honed in on him as a potential criminal. A paparazzo scales the wall at Simpson’s home to catch the five seconds he happens to be in handcuffs, and it goes the ’90s equivalent of viral. It felt not unlike a damning YouTube or Snapchat video making the rounds of the Internet. And O.J. acts just like the public wants to see: He looks and sounds like a high-strung diva, pacing around his mansion while his entourage sits tensely by, snapping at his people for not making this go away fast enough. So far, he’s managed to keep his histrionics in check during actual police interactions, as we see from a chilling interrogation in which he dodges questions with the same ease with which he rushed the football field. With the omniscient-third narration provided by Toobin’s extensive access, we already see this case as multi-faceted, but there’s still a level of mystery. Shapiro asks O.J. multiple times if he has anything to tell him in private. Simpson himself has more than one piece of dialogue with ominous subtext, like when he tells his freeloading friend Kato, “You like those burgers, don’t you? You told the cops you went out for burgers last night, right? Good, because that’s what happened.” And of course, there’s damning behavior like the Bronco chase, which closes out the pilot – brilliant, as it’s one of the most iconic images of the trial. Let’s not forget that moments before, O.J. is holding a gun to his head in Kim Kardashian’s childhood bedroom while Robert pleads, “You can’t do that, this is where my little girl sleeps.” And that actually happened! You can’t make this stuff up.
