The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story: The Verdict

April 5, 2016 9:26 PM - Season 1, Episode 10

The jury reaches its decision, and not everyone agrees with it.
posted by kittens for breakfast (9 comments total)

Vanity Fair Fact Check for Episode 10
Rolling Stone ditto
Slate includes this gem: Darden’s remarks were written in part by a private stalking and domestic-violence expert named Gavin de Becker, author of the bestselling 1997 book The Gift of Fear.
posted by TWinbrook8 at 6:42 PM on April 6, 2016 [5 favorites]

My first reaction when I heard about this was "ugh - please, just let it go, people." But they won me over and - even more shocking to me - made me think of the whole thing in a new light. It wasn't just spectacle...the trial both represented the world we lived in and laid the foundation for the one we are in now.
posted by double bubble at 6:01 AM on April 7, 2016 [5 favorites]

Amazing series; surpassed my expectations in almost every way. Cast was stunning, direction, music, script.

I must be one of the few who loved John Travolta's performance as the vain, eccentric, prissy Robert Shapiro. Last scene with him left us no doubt as to how the other team members felt about him.

Shoutout to Sterling Brown (Chris Darden) and Sarah Paulson (Marcia Clark) who turned in award-worthy performances. I don't have much to give but accolades, it would seem. Those two should receive awards, along with Courtney B. Vance (Johnnie Cochran), and I quite liked Kenneth Choi as Judge Lance Ito.

The ending side-by-side photos of the actors with the real-life person they portrayed was a good call, and I was touched by the final two photos of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman.

I don't understand the 'liable for their deaths' text disclosed at the end: that O.J. was found liable in a civil suit later brought by both the families - what does that mean? Surely he was already found innocent, you cannot be tried twice for the same crime.
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 11:48 PM on April 7, 2016 [3 favorites]

If I understand right, the burden of proof in a criminal case is much higher than for a civil case - so I think that is why he could be acquitted in a criminal court yet be found guilty in the civil court.

I totally agree, surpassed expectations and if Sarah Paulson doesn't win an award for this I will be really cranky.
posted by wheek wheek wheek at 3:14 AM on April 8, 2016 [2 favorites]

Yes, the civil court standard is "preponderance of the evidence", i.e. more likely than not, so if you decide the chance that the respondent is liable is even 51%, then the plaintiff wins. "Beyond a reasonable doubt" is a much higher bar to cross.

+1 to everything double bubble said above. I resisted watching this for several weeks but it was worth it... although some scenes were physically painful to watch knowing how the trainwreck would end. When Chris Darden had the brainstorm of 'our side needs a dramatic moment for the cameras, I know, let's have OJ try on the glove in open court!' I nearly tried to reach through the screen and restrain him.

Cuba Gooding Jr. was the weak link in the cast for me, but his acting in the post-verdict scenes, especially at the party where OJ realizes 'hold up, I may have been found not guilty but no one really believes I'm innocent', is terrific.
posted by Flannery Culp at 5:26 AM on April 8, 2016 [4 favorites]

The problem with Cuba Gooding, Jr. is that we know very well what the real OJ looks and sounds like, and this isn't it. The actor seemed to decide to embody the role, rather than delivering an impression. I'm not sure he was the best choice, just because his not-OJ-ness is really distracting at first -- somehow even more than David Schwimmer's Ross-ness (though Schwimmer grew on me a lot over the course of the series) -- but viewed just an actor playing a part, I think he did a fine job.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 10:54 AM on April 8, 2016 [3 favorites]

I was too young for this when it was going on , which also means I didn't really know OJ or anyone else involved. I thought Cuba was great. I actually had the worst expectations for David Schwimmer because it really looked like he was just playing Ross again, but I'll be damned if Ross wasn't the perfect character for Bob Kardashian (again, not at all familiar with him in real life).
posted by LizBoBiz at 7:21 AM on April 10, 2016

Really no one except maybe Johnnie Cochran was quite the same kind of hugely indentifiable media presence OJ himself became. Schwimmer doesn't look all that much like Kardashian -- and I don't remember hearing Kardashian speak at all -- but he looks a heck of a lot like Ross from Friends, and that was really hard for me to see past initially. But he sold it.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 6:11 PM on April 10, 2016

I, too, felt that Gooding was the weak link. He's a fine actor, but there was nothing about his portrayal of OJ that was frightening or intimidating to me and he was often just whiny. OJ himself is a large, intimidating man and, more to the point, despite his friendly smiles and approachableness (genuine, I think, and Gooding got that aspect of him down well), there was a noticeable scary intensity inside that you could see sometimes under some circumstances. Gooding's version lacked all of that.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 3:44 PM on April 14, 2016 [2 favorites]