Where to Stream: The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story



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Now that we have entered the second half of this season, let’s pause for a moment to reflect on the sheer oddity of reading (and writing!) weekly recaps of The People v. O.J. Simpson. Based upon events deeply ingrained in the public conscious, the series has successfully gathered our collective memories and remixed them with stimulating fury. In that sense, the show is itself a recap — a recounting of events past, camped up and pimped out with stylized swagger. Regrettably, that makes what you are reading a most ignoble form: a recap of a recap.

With nothing to spoil, recapping The People v. O.J. Simpson has been like recapping a good European history textbook — it’s all old (often gruesome) news. The story of Joan of Arc’s execution for heresy is widely known, but the slavish recapper must discover some unexploited historical nuance to drape his purple prose upon.

Which brings us to Marcia Clark!

Marcia Clark, the protagonist of this entire installment (episode 6, “Marcia, Marcia, Marcia”), is certainly the most radically redrawn figure of the entire series. (Which is saying a lot — this show is chockablock with reconstituted characters, from the cry-baby histrionics of John Travolta’s Robert Shapiro to the delicate juice swooning of David Schwimmer’s Robert Kardashian.) Clark, who was seriously (and unfairly) disliked in the mid-’90s, here is reconfigured as something of a feminist icon, enduring the vicissitudes of modern womanhood: sexist language about her appearance, a difficult custody battle, and the exhausting compromises of work and family.

But even as she is sympathetically redrawn by Sarah Paulson, the travails Clark endures exceed those of the Everywoman. She must wake up to radio shock jocks polling her as “bitch or babe.” She must tolerate focus group labels like “sketchy” and “strident.” She must react to an opposing lead attorney who calls her “hysterical.” And she must endure a boss informing her that the National Enquirer published photos of her topless. (Can you imagine?)

Driven to the brink, Marcia Clark finally unleashes on Johnny Cochran in the courtroom, foregrounding a schism between race and gender that has been quietly simmering below the surface:

Your honor, I am offended by Mr. Cochran’s remarks as a woman and as a mother. Mr. Cochran may not know what it’s like to work a 70-hour work week and also take care of a family, but I do. And many other people do to. To belittle my childcare issues in your courtroom is unconscionable and totally out of line.

The reaction? It may as well have been a soliloquy.

In addition to boldly rewritten characters that diverge from their preconceived types, another metanarrative around the series deserves acknowledgement — its ratings.

If you haven’t noticed, the ratings for The People V. O.J. Simpson have been exceptionally good. Nearly every Tuesday, it has been the highest rated show on primetime cable, approaching nearly 10 million viewers. (The newfound knife from O.J.’s backyard will likely bolster viewership even more this week.) More surprisingly, the series is performing extremely well in the cherished 18-34 demographic — which includes many people too young to remember many of the actual details of this case.

The youthful audience begs a question: Why are millennials watching a show about an era they couldn’t have nostalgia for? Jeffrey Toobin, who wrote the book on which this series is based, recently offered an interesting answer, related to a change in the media climate:

Suddenly the mid-’90s seem like a long time ago, and one reason I think they do is that the media environment is almost unrecognizably different from 1994 and 1995. There was no internet, no Fox News, no MSNBC, no social media. So you had a kind of crude, broad focus without the compensations of alternative voices on Twitter and Facebook. So when the National Enquirer decided to make fun of Marcia Clark’s hairdo, there was no article in Slate or Salon or posts on Twitter saying “Stop this sexist bullshit.”

While the actual trial predated our era of call-and-response hot takes, a premium cable show more than twenty years later is perfectly tuned to its outrage. This series approaches brilliance by embodying the recap we never had, filling the void of alternate storylines never allowed by the media environment of the time.

For millennials who didn’t live through the trial, the extended storyline about Clark’s makeover might seem oddly obsessive. But those of us who endured the spectacle know how all-consuming those curls were. (The stylist responsible for the new hairdo also gave Farrah Fawcett her Charlie’s Angels mane and Diane Keaton her Annie Hall frump cut. That I remember this without resorting to Google is evidence enough of its enduring storyline.) In an era when Hillary Clinton’s haircut was also relentlessly dissected, no social media outlets existed to aggregate an outrage around “Stop This Sexist Bullshit” headlines.

This show is that headline.

In The People v. O.J. Simpson, the new hairstyle provides Clark with the briefest respite from a world of media dissection. As Seal’s “Kiss From A Rose” echoes (in her head?), she strolls into the courtroom, reinvigorated:

The jubilous moment is as fleeting as it is rare. As the spooky trip-hop of Portishead’s “Sour Times” plays, her joy transforms into defeat. Before a phalanx of gorgon tabloids in the checkout lane, Clark sees her smirk looking back, like Medusa before Perseus.

While she gazes at the headlines, the checkout lane cashier notices a box of Tampax. “Uh-oh, looks like the defense is in for one hell of a week.”

“Stop this sexist bulllshit,” says no one.

But, in a sense, Marcia Clark will get her revenge. Not only would she receive a reported $4.2 million to write a memoir about the case (originally published in 1997, Without a Doubt was released as an ebook last month), but the Simpson trial raised the awareness of domestic violence (as well as the consequences of not speaking out against it).

And the soap opera around her hairstyle had an unforeseen effect — it helped kill the actual soap opera. In the 2010 documentary O.J. Monster or Myth?, Clark describes the effect of the trial on daytime television:

When it began, all of the networks were getting these hate-mail letters because people’s soap operas were being interrupted for the Simpson trial. But then what happened was the people who liked soap operas got addicted to the Simpson trial. And they got really upset when the Simpson trial was over, and people would come up to me on the street and say, “God, I loved your show.”

In The People v. O.J. Simpson, this is dramatized as a network executive telling his programming director to cancel the entire daytime slate. “This is a better daytime soap than anything we’ve got,” he says of the trial. “I’d sure as hell rather watch O.J. than some dumb doctor have an affair with a nurse.”

Of the 10 biggest soaps of 1995, only four still remain today.

Of all the effects that the O.J. Simpson trial had on society, the most pernicious was what it did to the identity politics of the ’90s. (For a flashback to the era, watch belle hooks discuss how merely writing about Simpson had a regressive effect, only adding to the spectacle and obfuscating the concerns of domestic violence. Such a meta ’90s way to think!)

Repeatedly through the show, we have seen how race and gender were posed against each other in the trial. The series boldly acknowledges this by positioning this gender-debating episode directly after the previous installment, “The Race Card.” After relentless identity conflict, we are provided only one glimmer of hope: Marcia Clark and Chris Darden dancing to “Who’s That Lady?” in the office. The intimate moment, with an Isley Brothers outro, represents a rare respite, a time for communities positioned against each other to heal.

Miscellaneous Historical Notes:

In an interesting twist, there was a big change in the show’s soundtrack that happened in between when the press got screener copies of the show (back in January) and when the show aired. The scene where Marcia Clark strolls into the courtroom, soundtracked by Seal’s “Kiss From A Rose” in the version that was broadcast last night, was originally scored by “Sour Times” by Portishead, a gloomy, foreboding trip-hop song (which now just appears in the scene where Marcia goes to the grocery store and sees herself splayed across the tabloids). The context of that first scene seems completely different now. Which is better, though? Clearly Ryan Murphy and team chose Seal.

Gordon Clark — Marcia’s ex with whom she has a custody battle — was a computer engineer and an officer in the Church of Scientology.

The 1994 Joni Mitchell song “Not to Blame” is reportedly about two domestic abuse cases: O.J.’s abuse of Nicole and a reported incident involving Jackson Browne and Daryl Hannah. The first line: “The story hit the news / From coast to coast / They said you beat the girl / You loved the most.”

A 1995 poll revealed that 8 out of 10 people would rather have Robert Shapiro their lawyer than Marcia Clark.

After the trial, Clark became a mystery novelist. Her most recent crime novel, Blood Defense, will be released in May.

Rex Sorgatz writes recaps of recaps @fimoculous.