The Time-Skipping Glee of ‘The People v. O.J. Simpson’: Episode 1 Recap

The first image is not, as you might expect, the iconic white Bronco, rambling down the sun-kissed California freeway. Nor is it Simpson himself — neither the luggage-leaping spokesperson, nor the glove-wiggling suspect in Judge Ito’s kangaroo court. It’s not even slow-mo gridiron footage, like his epic 1969 Rose Bowl dash, or a dissembling juke that leaves a linebacker’s cleats where his knees were.

The first images in The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story, the true crime dramatic reenactment series that premiered last night on FX, have nothing (directly) to do with The Juice. The vivid pilot episode instead commences in 1992, with a montage of Rodney King, being pulverized by the LAPD, and the ensuing race riots in South Central Los Angeles — two years before Orenthal James Simpson would be accused of a brutal double murder, including that of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson.

This is what lawyers call a strong opening argument.

That argument, made with a clamor by the show’s mischievous director and executive producer, Ryan Murphy, posits that one simple factor — race — propelled the entire trial of O.J. Simpson. This is not a wildly unique claim, mostly because no claim about the relentlessly discussed “trial of the century” could be wildly unique. The same assertion was proposed by Jeffrey Toobin in his New Yorker reporting at the time, later upgraded to a book, The Run of His Life, from which the show is adapted:

If race does become a significant factor in this case — if the case becomes transformed from a mere soap opera to a civil-rights melodrama; that is, from the Menendez brothers writ large to Rodney King redux — then the stakes will change dramatically.

In this 10-episode anthology, the stakes do change dramatically. Anyone who has grown accustomed to the plodding binges of the past few years will be jolted out of their Serial Reddit boards by O.J.‘s tabloid tempo. This true crime epic is raucous and soapy, but only marginally investigatory, with little interest in levying innocence or guilt. More Empire than The Staircase, and therefore destined to win Emmys, the hyperreal series stakes no claim in adjudicating history. It would rather revel in the playground of memory than challenge perceptions.

This retro-history is a stark contrast to today’s other longform true crime, especially Making a Murderer, the legal process Netflix doc that, to distinguish itself from an overwrought whodunit mystery, cleverly dubbed its genre howdunit. If that’s the case, one might say that The People v. O.J. is a whendunit — a show that bathes in the history of its time.

This gleeful nostalgia — on the precipice of camp, but shrewd enough not to cross — glares brightest in the casting, which plops characters from your youth onto the TV room beanbag. Here are some of the major players from that era, spliced with the actor playing them in the series:

The waves of television memory roar loudest when Malcolm-Jamal Warner bounds into a scene with the audacity of a where-are-they-now? slideshow that you can’t… not… click. He’s playing O.J.’s Bronco pilot, Al “AC” Cowlings, but he’s also, in a sense, embodying himself, or the character from our memories of The Cosby Show living room.

It’s almost as if the cast was chosen by asking “Where were you when the white Bronco fled down the Los Angeles asphalt?” That was June 1994, so John Travolta, here hijacking scenes as inimical defense attorney Robert Shapiro, would have been preparing for the release of Pulp Fiction in a few months. Sarah Paulson (Marcia Clark) would soon break through in the CBS series American Gothic, as would, in a few years, Selma Blair (Kris Jenner) with the movie Cruel Intentions. Nathan Lane (F. Lee Bailey) would soon be nominated for a Golden Globe (and win an MTV Movie Award) for The Birdcage. And Cuba Gooding, Jr. (O.J. Simpson), who had been celebrated in Boyz N The Hood a couple years earlier, would go on to win an Oscar for Jerry Maguire.

In 1994, O.J. himself was promoting a movie (his last), Naked Gun 33⅓: The Final Insult, with co-star, Anna Nicole Smith. Here they are having the time of their life on Donahue:

The fiction/nonfiction line blurs even more when Johnnie Cochran enters the scene. Almost everyone in Los Angeles would eventually end up a degree of separation from O.J.’s lead defense attorney, who compiled a massive entertainment clientele that included actors (Todd Bridges), athletes (Jim Brown, Riddick Bowe, Marion Jones), and musicians (Snoop Dogg, Michael Jackson, Sean Combs, Tupac Shakur). Here he is played by Courtney B. Vance, fittingly most known from Law & Order.

But it is the actor Evan Handler (most known for his roles in Sex and the City and Californication) who, as sagacious defense attorney Alan Dershowitz, embodies the most insane example of this I Love the ’90s retrospective. Six weeks after O.J. creeped up I-405 with a fleet of cop sirens trailing, Handler was in the cineplex with a bit role in Natural Born Killers. (Oliver Stone actually spliced a few frames of the Bronco chase into the final cut of the psychedelic road film written by Quentin Tarantino.) But less auspiciously, he also had a new TV series coming out on NBC in the Fall, with an improbable lead actor:

Yes, Frogmen really starred O.J., as a Navy SEAL, and yes, the tagline really was “Trained killers. Killer waves.” NBC never released this “A-Team in water” series, for obvious reasons, not including how terrible it looks. (See also: This article by Brian Lowry of the Los Angeles Times, originally published on May 8, 2000, entitled “The Saga of O.J.’s Last, Lost Pilot.”)

And David Schwimmer? In 1994, Schwimmer’s life would change forever, when as part of NBC’s new Fall lineup, Friends would drop like a scalding venti latte on an unsuspecting public. And now, 22 years later, Schwimmer plays the role of O.J.’s literal best friend, Robert Kardashian — a name that will send off alarms that reverberate through time.

Oh yeah, O.J. was Kim Kardashian’s godfather.

Toward the end of the first episode, this scene appears, the platonic ideal of three decades of pop culture mashing itself to pulp:

That is supposed to be a typical ’90s teenager’s bedroom. But an extremely atypical teen slept here — it’s Kim Kardashian’s bedroom!

This house in the hills of Encino, the “hideout” home of Robert Kardashian, is where O.J. stayed the day he was to be arrested. (If you would like to own a piece of entertainment history, the actual five-bedroom house is currently up for sale — a steal at $1.3M.) Sleeping in Kimmy’s room, under heartthrob posters of Jonathan Taylor Thomas (Home Improvement) and Joey Lawrence (Blossom), O.J. almost committed suicide in this room, but according to new reporting, was interrupted by Kris Jenner, who was pregnant with Kendall at the time. (So this room is basically ground zero of three generations of pop culture.)

In the dramatized version, Dr. Ross pleads with his gun-wielding friend: “O.J. no please, this is where my daughter sleeps. O.J., please do not kill yourself in Kimmy’s bedroom.” Immediately after this, O.J. flees out the back door, into a white Bronco and onto the freeway grid, for the joy ride of his life.

If all this seems a historical phantasmagoria, like a mashup of your child television memories, consider how this photo has accrued meaning over time:

That’s O.J. Simpson serving as the best man in Ahmad Rashad’s wedding, where Bill Cosby gave away the bride (and his TV wife) Phylicia. All of that happened!

The People v. O.J. Simpson elicits this dreamy mood: a nostalgia for an alternate universe that was our actual universe. Like a conspiracy theory minus the conspiracy, the O.J. Simpson case has inextricably knotted itself to the future of media and entertainment. As Kanye — himself once a product of this era; now, a participant in it — said, long before Kimye:

How long, indeed.

As we will discuss in the coming weeks, The People v. O.J. Simpson is a battlefield of race and celebrity and media, but mostly it is a show about memory, particularly how our creaky remembrances stretch their boney fingers into the present. Even the genre itself — the made-for-television movie — is a legacy act of a bygone era. But like the dusty couch in the attic, our refurbished memories can become modern conversation pieces, when renovated by prestige cable.

Settle into your dusty couch, it will be a bumpy ride.

Miscellaneous Historical Notes:

• The bloody-pawed dog seen in the opening scene was the family pet — an Akita named Kato. O.J. and Nicole’s son changed the name of the dog to Satchmo during the trial.

• In 1977, O.J. was the first football player to land on the cover of Rolling Stone. The following year, he became the second player (after Fran Tarkenton) to host SNL.
• O.J. received a lie detector test in this episode. The person who actually administered that test was a famous polygrapher, Ed Gelb. Those who have an especially good memory for ’90s conspiracies might remember that name — Ed Gelb also conducted a lie detector test on El Duce, the punk rocker who claimed that Courtney Love tried to hire him to murder Kurt Cobain. Interestingly, O.J. bombed his lie detector test, but El Duce aced his.
• During the filming of Naked Gun 33⅓, O.J. and Anna Nicole Smith apparently hooked up, because he later claimed possible paternity of her daughter, Dannielynn.
• When President Bill Clinton met Boris Yeltsin for the first time in 1995, the Russian President’s first question was, “Do you think O.J. did it?”
• If you’ve ever pondered the democratizing effect that recaps have had on television culture, you might be interested in a recap of this episode written by Kato Kaelin.

Next week: Episode 2: The Juice is loose!

Rex Sorgatz flees The Man down a highway called @fimoculous.