To be transparent, I should make one thing clear: I’m coming at the “Trial of the Century” of athlete-turned-movie-star O.J. “The Juice” Simpson from the perspective of a millennial. That can be assumed for the bulk of the MOVE Magazine audience.
Anyone in college today wouldn’t have been glued to their television for the tumultuous 17 months from murder to not guilty, though by now we’re surely familiar with at least a few of the details. A white Bronco hurtling down the interstate. That lawyer, something Kardashian, with the three famous daughters. The defense’s oft-repeated motto, “If the glove does not fit, you must acquit.” An African-American man in the jury holding up a Black Power fist at the conclusion of the trial, signifying the deep racial divide the case helped expose.
What’s great about FX’s “American Crime Story: The People v. O.J. Simpson,” the stunning new anthology series from Ryan Murphy that debuted Tuesday, is that it’s new and illuminating for both those who lived through the case and a younger generation vaguely familiar with it. It’s telling a new story, one of behind-the-scenes moments with all the key players that the world never saw. I won’t comment on the show’s accuracy to the non-fiction novel it’s based on, “The Run of His Life: The People v. O.J. Simpson” — [though others have](http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2016/02/02/fact_vs_fiction_in_the_people_v_o_j_simpson_american_crime_story.html) — but instead, look at this thing like the well-crafted addition to the peak TV canon that it is.
On a purely aesthetic level, “The People” emulates the look and feel of this era of cinematic television that cable networks like FX have ushered in, with a slow, creeping pace and swooping cinematography. It also makes one think of “Making a Murderer” or “The Jinx,” feeding our of-the-moment obsession with true-crime docu-drama (in this case, dramatized docu-drama).
Screenwriters Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski (The People vs. Larry Flynt), who developed the series, contextualize this true story right out the gate, with real footage of the Rodney King riots that rocked Los Angeles in 1992. After that, the screen fades to black, a title card “Two Years Later” pops into frame and we see O.J. Simpson (Cuba Gooding Jr., a welcome return to the mainstream) leaving his home in the dead of night. He gets into a limousine, apologizing for his lateness, and there’s something oddly stiff about his speech. Does it seem like he just committed a grisly double-homicide? Not clear; this show never takes a definitive stance either way. But moments later a man stumbles upon the murdered bodies of Nicole Brown-Simpson, his ex-wife, and Ronald L. Goldman, a man she was with, and the cops arrive. Only when they go to Simpson’s house to inform him do they notice some evidence — blood on the Bronco, the front steps and that black glove — and declare: “This is a crime scene.”
From that point on, we get a series of wonderfully scripted introductions to key players in the trial. Marcia Clark (Sarah Paulson), the relentless prosecutor with the quintessential ’90s perm who many decried a “bitch,” begins working on the case with a team of cops and lawyers, vowing that “he won’t get away with killing her.” Robert Shapiro (John Travolta, with an unsettling face like hard plastic) gets connected with Robert Kardashian (Ross Gell—um, I mean, David Schwimmer) to lead the defense in spite of O.J. outright failing his lie-detector test. Johnny Cochrane (Courtney B. Vance, the standout in a stellar cast) shouts at a colleague, Christopher Darden (Sterling K. Brown), about “choosing a side” in response to his gripes about having to defend possibly dirty cops. That scene in particular is one of the most telling in the premier given what we know today, that Cochrane will end up on the side of the defense and Darden the prosecution. The show winks at the audience like this many times — most notably when Kardashian and his ex, Kris Jenner (Selma Blair) reference Khloe, Kourtney and Kim — but never overdoes it. We get just enough context to remember this was an influential moment in American culture, a case that had far-reaching implications on celebrity, reality TV, the 24-hour news cycle and, above all else, race.
If the “still to come” clip montage at the end of the episode is any indication, this will continue to be a riveting series filled with heavy drama and savory dialogue, and you can already count on inevitable Emmy nominations for — at the very least — Vance, Paulson, the writing team and Murphy. The ending may be written in stone, but watching “The People” is thrilling because it provokes the devilishly enjoyable feeling of peeking behind the curtain of American history. That’s pretty cool, even for us millennials.
