Jesse Hawken
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171: American Crime Story: The People v. O.J. Simpson, Part 1 (with Karen Geier)
🕑 Added 2024-06-28 14:55:44 +0000 UTCWith the recent death of O.J. Simpson and this month’s 30th anniversary of the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman, the writer and content strategist Karen Geier returns for a look at the other great O.J. tv epic of 2016, Ryan Murphy’s 10 part series The People v. O. J. Simpson: American Crime Story Season 1.
On part one of our discussion we discuss the cottage industry of content that surrounded the Simpson trial, and how Murphy rose to the occasion in this series by approaching this story as history, tragedy and camp, infusing soap opera theatrics into the retelling of a true life televised trial that in turn led to the replacement of soap operas with reality television, and how the Kardashian family, through their involvement in the trial, directly benefited from this cultural sea change.
We discuss in detail a few of the fine performances from the ensemble cast, including from some unexpected turns: Connie Britton as Faye Resnick, David Schwimmer as Robert Kardashian, John Travolta as Robert Shapiro, Nathan Lane as F. Lee Bailey and Cuba Gooding Jr. as O.J., and we dig into one of the best episodes, the one that centers on Marcia Clark and the one episode that deviates from the source material, Jeffrey Toobin’s The Run of His Life, and dramatizes moments from Marcia Clark’s 1997 memoir Without a Doubt, focusing on the intense sexism she faced while trying to prosecute this case.
Follow Karen Geier on Twitter.
Comments
Jesper Ohlsson
"...sports-fucking, miss Resnick?"
Kenny Hedges
My entire sixth grade class was called into the library to hear the O.J. verdict. 9/11, I had to ask permission to go check.
