In 2014, the writer Lili Anolik wrote a story for Vanity Fair with the provocative premise that O.J. Simpson “killed popular culture.” How he managed to do that, she explained, was simple. The trial of the former football player, affectionately known to his closest golfing pals and fans alike as The Juice, in the murder of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend, a waiter named Ronald Goldman, was the biggest media spectacle of the television age, a true-crime story being played out with real people and transmitted into living rooms across the country. Reportedly 150 million people tuned in to see the verdict. This moment, according to Anolik, was the dawn of popular culture as a thing without meaning and the ushering in of an age of vapidness. In short, the birth of reality television.That idea works better in theory than it does in practice, but its connection to our current obsessions with staged “reality” is the backbone of “American Crime Story: The People vs. O.J. Simpson,” which premieres February 2 on FX. Presented as a docudrama, with the biggest stunt-casting coup of all time — Cuba Gooding, Jr. as Simpson, John Travolta as tanned attorney Robert Shapiro, Sarah Paulson as prosecutor Marcia Clark — the 10-episode series is only tangentially interested in exploring the trial’s complex relationship with race or its impact on the criminal justice system. Instead, it goes down the rabbit hole of gossip and tabloid weirdness, focusing on the tawdriest of details and wackiest of twists, many of which are played for humor. It also reminds us, multiple times, that the Kardashian family, via their father, Robert Kardashian (David Schwimmer), a friend of Simpson and eventual member of legal Dream Team that represented him, were connected to this pivotal moment in history. Isn’t that weird?Well, not really. It’s something that’s simply a fact, and not much more. If you knocked on the door of each house in Brentwood, the manicured-lawn neighborhood where Simpson lived and where the crime took place, you’d find that most of Simpson’s neighbors were and still are famous. What “The People vs. O.J. Simpson” doesn’t seem to understand is that it is itself a product of the age it is trying to condemn, or at least make fun of. One of the show’s executive producers, Ryan Murphy (who also directed multiple episodes in the series), has made a career of television — from “Nip/Tuck” to the “American Horror Story” franchise — that is steeped in an ironic, knowing cleverness to mask the fact that it’s void of any ideas.“The People vs. O.J. Simpson” isn’t any different, except that it’s convinced that it is full of ideas — about media saturation, about race — and can’t reconcile those ideas with the need to titillate and sensationalize. It’s the equivalent of saying “The Bachelor,” for instance, is really about love. That’s not to say that dialogue about race is completely absent from the show. And in a few moments it works, as in a flashback scene involving attorney Johnny Cochran (Courtney B. Vance) getting slammed on the hood of his car by a police officer while his kids are in the backseat, all because he is a black man driving a nice car. The white people walking past either don’t seem to notice or turn away in disgust from the angry black man, providing a nice counterbalance to the white people in the courtroom who offer him the same reaction. Or the moment when Christopher Darden, a member of the District Attorney’s office, realizes that his main reason for being on the defense team is the color of his skin, a strategy to debunk Cochran’s pronouncements of racism.But these more substantive scenes are few and far between. “The People vs. O.J. Simpson” is too concerned with celebrity, and greed, and the hilarious exploits of the rich and famous. The perfect example of this is the inclusion of Faye Resnick (Connie Britton), a friend of Nicole Brown Simpson who wrote a memoir of their time together and who popularized the blowjob euphemism “Brentwood Hello.” She is given ample screen time, mostly, it seems, for an audience who will recognize her name from appearances on “The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills” and “Keeping Up With the Kardashians.” She is a strange character, to be sure, but her inclusion presents a tonal shift that the show can’t contain. It wants to do two things at once — to criticize the culture of celebrity and reality television while at the same time constantly winking at it. Unfortunately, it’s not smart enough to fully engage with either.
↧