The Provocative OJ Saga

The acting is first-rate, the peek inside the criminal justice system is riveting, all the characters are larger than life, but the thing that makes the FX miniseries American Crime Story: The People vs. OJ Simpson such a provocative tour de force is the way it makes viewers see that all the social ills—race, sexism, a mind-warping fascination with celebrities—that infected the so-called Trial of the Century, continue to plague the nation today. It’s not hard to trace the dots between today’s Black Lives Matter movement and the OJ defense team’s winning strategy of painting a police force as a racist entity prone to profiling and using excessive tactics. Likewise, the gender-bias that prosecutor Marcia Clark contended with—the media mercilessly critiqued her hair, her fashions, her aggressive manner—is something even the most prominent of women still grapple with in 2016 (case in point: an MSNBC anchor recently chided Hillary Clinton for not smiling more). If you lived through the OJ trial, the miniseries makes you revisit your perceptions of the entire circus, and wonder how much you got played by the lawyers and the news outlets. If you’re too young to remember the trial, American Crime Story will not only get you riled up about the senseless murder of two people whose lives got obscured in the fog of fame surrounding OJ, it will make you incensed that so little has changed some 20 years later.

The finale of American Crime Story: The People vs. OJ Simpson airs on Tuesday April 5 at 10pm on FX.