‘People v. OJ Simpson’ shows how divided culture was on race — and still is

ANALYSIS/OPINION

A strange thing happened after I turned off my TV Tuesday night after catching the 1 a.m. replay of the finale of “American Crime Story: The People v. OJ Simpson,” FX’s outstanding 10-part miniseries that recreated, in all its cringing detail, the arrest, trial and ultimate acquittal of the fallen football star.

I once again turned over the case, and its fictional representation, over and over in my mind — sleep continually elusive amid such neuronal firings.

It was a story I — along with everyone else tuning in, save perhaps some not born before 1995 — knew the ending to, having stood collectively with the rest of my TV class at Hunterdon Central High School in Flemington, New Jersey, on a cold December afternoon in 1995 to hear the verdict read aloud. It bothered me then, and 20-plus years later, it bothered me again. Not because I expected it to somehow turn out differently in an alternate TV timeline, but because the issues raised by that hell-in-a-courtroom sideshow miscarriage of justice tore the scab off America’s uncertain racial politics that, two decades later, as the first black president winds down his final year in office, continue to simmer.

Tuesday evening’s finale episode, aptly and simply titled “The Verdict,” brought the 10-week must-see event to a close in high-drama fashion, not only recreating the final moments of Simpson’s yearlong trial but also re-festering the incomparable wounds that the entire affair sullied upon America’s soul. The outstanding, sublime Courtney B. Vance as Johnny Cochrane breaks down in tears watching as then-President Clinton weighs in on the verdict, assuring that a celebrity murder trial had become, for better or worse, the biggest news in the nation.

Much can and will be said about this superbly realized miniseries, masterminded by showrunners Scott Alexander and Larry Karszewski and based on the book “The Run of His Life” by New Yorker contributor Jeffrey Toobin that turned a two-decade-old case into tune-in TV for the new millennium. That America continues to have a problem with race is not news — one need only pop into any Twitter forum on our president to see as much — but the hindsight of 20 years allows for a certain looking back with eyes a little less jaded by time away, and less numbed by the shock of surprise at the verdict by both Simpson’s defenders and detractors.

“The Verdict,” and the series’, most searing sequence showed in DePalma-esque split screen the judgment read in the courtroom: Cochrane and Simpson beam as prosecutors Marcia Clark’s and Chris Darden’s faces fall, and slain Ron Goldman’s mother Sharon wails in agony. Human melodrama in and of itself, but what Messrs. Alexander and Karszewski, and episode director Ryan Murphy, conjured next was nothing sort of transcendent: showing the schism of reactions throughout America, with blacks overwhelming cheering in joy and white people clearly disappointed.

It was, if nothing else, a welcome vindication for the black community, which only three years prior had been slighted by a gross injustice in the wake of the trials of those tried for beating Rodney King.

This time, for OJ, L.A. would not catch fire.

For all its grandstanding and bringing America’s toxicity of race to the fore, “People v. OJ” was primarily a human drama, the kind of examination of tragic players that can only come with so much remove from the events themselves. One of the absolute strengths of the series was to take no position of Simpson’s guilt or innocence, but rather to examine the fallout not only on his family, lawyers and prosecutors, but on America at large. All that pressure, all those eyes cast on a bland courtroom could not help but put tremendous pressure on the cast to a certain breaking point.

If there was a “hero” in the series, it was Sarah Paulson’s Marcia Clark, a stern professional woman out to do her job — and so ungodly, unfairly picked apart for her looks, her voice, her tough-as-nails attitude. In short, being “bitchy” and perhaps not as camera-friendly as America wanted, opening her to all manner of derogatory, sexist attacks. She was picked apart relentlessly, culminating in the notorious nude photos sent to a tabloid by an ex-husband.

One scene shows her buying feminine products, with the male clerk cheerily intoning “Gonna be a tough week for the defense, huh?” Whether or not this incident is apocryphal, it is all but certain Messrs. Cochrane, Shapiro, Bailey, et al. never dealt with anything similar. 

Miss Paulson modulated her performance in a master’s class of thespianism. She turned Marcia Clark into a competent professional suddenly cast into the national spotlight, and who found herself under all manner of assault due to her gender alone. That she was able to maintain such a brave face and continue to do her job through it all is, frankly, miraculous.

Much has been speculated about her relationship with assistant prosecutor Christopher Darden (a fine Sterling K. Brown) in a were-they-or-weren’t-they involved intimately beyond being colleagues. They would hardly have been the first co-workers — or boss/subordinate — to have done so, but the series wisely left it to ambiguity, showing instead an intimacy of cause, spirit and professional determination, and being in the trenches that was more bonding than any sexual congress could ever be.

And then there was the magnificent Mr. Vance, whose Johnnie Cochrane fulminates at the podium, swaggering for the cameras and successfully applying prestidigitation to transform the villain in the proceedings from a double-murderer — whomever, Cochrane claims, he or they turn out to be — into a conspiring Los Angeles Police Department, whose machinations surely, he says, surely, planted the evidence against OJ, somehow got his blood on the notorious ill-fitting glove and orchestrated a vast plot to frame a famous black man.

For such a narrative, Cochrane had his perfect antagonist personified in the person of Det. Mark Fuhrman (the icily perfect Steven Pasquale), whose despicable racism was outed during the trial on tapes that not only had him dropping the “N” word on a regular basis, but also saw him mocking Judge Lance Ito’s wife, who once supervised him on the force.

That Det. Fuhrman was a POS is not in doubt, then or now. His being the lead detective at the Brentwood mansion only further helped Cochrane’s counternarrative that the LAPD was up to no good, and the tapes of his racist rants all but sealed the deal for the jurors — 10 black, two white. One of the series’ great moments had F. Lee Bailey (Nathan Lane) asking Det. Furhman under oath if he had ever used “that word” before, which the policeman firmly denies. As Mr. Lane’s Bailey repeats the question again and again, the camera swoops in toward him and then toward Mr. Pasquale in turn, acting as more an interrogator than the actual query.

Det. Furhman, of course, would then later assert his Fifth Amendment right when asked if he perjured himself. Immediately following this scene, Mr. Brown’s Darden becomes unhinged, screaming at his boss for using him as their star witness. He knows, as we do, the case is lost.

The cast was almost uniformly magnificent, led by Miss Paulson and Mr. Vance on vanguard. John Travolta, who also produced, brought a severely wounded ego to his Robert Shapiro, the self-proclaimed alpha dog on the defense team who hired the other attorneys but gradually saw his influence and importance overshadowed by Cochrane.

If anyone had a true arc in the show, it was David Schwimmer’s Robert Kardashian, who at first will do anything for his friend “Juice” but gradually comes to believe that he has in fact made a deal with evil. In real life Kardashian stopped speaking with Simpson not long after the trial (he died in 2003) and publicly expressed doubts about his former friend’s innocence. Mr. Schwimmer does an admirable job of showcasing Kardashian’s fall from confidence to doubt to self-recrimination and ultimate disgust with himself, with Simpson and with the entire affair.

For having his name in the title, Cuba Gooding Jr.’s OJ was perhaps the least interesting of the show’s players. Mr. Gooding, ever reliable, shows Simpson coming unglued after the murders and during the infamous Bronco chase, threatening to kill himself with a gun to his head as the news cameras roll. While his performance was usually overshadowed by some of his castmates, what Mr. Gooding did exceptionally well was bring to the fore Simpson’s cockiness and self-perpetuating belief in his own narrative, reinforced by his friends and attorneys, that he could not possibly have done it.

One of his final scenes, in which he pledges to devote his life to finding “the real killers,” is done with precisely the right amount of self-satisfaction and a too-knowing smile. It is narcissism writ large for the cameras.

This was television as it can be, and how it should be. That it was peppered with adult language and even a nude scene of Mr. Gooding enjoying a hot shower at home after nearly two years behind bars shows that we’re ready for adult fiction that is this good.

If there is any “justice” in the real-life case, it is that Simpson today remains warehoused in a Florida prison for breaking into someone’s house to steal sports memorabilia, among other sins. While he can never again be tried for the murders, it is, if not vindication, perhaps karmic. The penultimate image of the episode shows Simpson, in prison duds, his hair white and his face plump, looking far from self-assured in older age.

Wisely, the show’s final twin image is of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman in better days. Amid all of the miasma of celebrity justice and cultural schism that followed their murders, it has been largely forgotten these were two real people whose lives were brutally cut short, their killer either serving time in a Florida prison or yet remaining unknown.