OJ: Made in America 9/10
This is a documentary series that aired a few months ago on ESPN. It's about the life of OJ Simpson and focused on his trial for murder of his wife Nicole Brown and the unlucky bystander Ronald Goldman. It covers his early life through his football and entertainment careers and on through the trial and post-trial life. It also has a lot of background material about the history of race relations in LA, which included Johnnie Cochran and his initial more minor fame from taking on police abuse lawsuits.
I thought the series was fantastic, engaging, compelling. It's long for a documentary at 10 hours over 5 episodes, but it doesn't feel too long, I wanted to see more. OJ is one of my football idols (him and Gale Sayers are my favorites from NFL films), and how his life turned into such a tragedy has always interested me. The series has a lot of footage of OJ's personal history as well LA history. It also has plenty of original material with interviews of many of the trial players -- the lawyers, the police, Fuhrman, jurors, OJ's friends and the victims' families. If you like true crime shows, this was like the best made in the genre, which means no reenactments. If you liked the recent miniseries, which I thought was likewise great, you should like this.
The trial was a true trial of the century. How the public responded (those "run Juice run" signs), the courtroom drama, all the complex social issues involved, everything about it. The guy was as clearly guilty as anybody has ever been, but he got off. The murder itself was vicious overkill, but maybe almost as disturbing and unjust is how he was able to repeatedly abuse his wife, and the police would be called and nothing real was ever done about it. There's a deep irony, considering how the trial unfolded, that he was actually great friends with the LAPD, he would have him them over to his house for parties, he loved them and they loved him back.
They talked to one juror who explicitly admitted that she voted not guilty as payback for Rodney King. The series does show both sides of that sentiment, why she would think like that but also why the verdict was factually wrong.
One minor but serendipitous aspect of the story is that the helicopter news team that captured the Reginald Denny beating also happened to be the first ones to get a shot of the Ford Bronco "chase."
I didn't know a lot about his later life, during which he apparently went into some kind of shame spiral culminating in another trial, for the incident in Las Vegas where he tried to retrieve some of his lost memorabilia. He was convicted this time. He was guilty, but the outcome was again unjust, because he was totally over-sentenced. It was so obvious that it was payback for the prior acquittal that I'm surprised it hasn't been overturned. He got 33 years for theft and kidnapping. I've seen a lot of trials where murderers got lighter sentences. He is up for parole next year.
