December has long been a sacred, maddening, and deeply silly time for pop-culture obsessives. It’s a period when many of us take stock of the previous 11 or so months and attempt to sum it up with lists, thinkpieces, tweets, and emotive emojis. Inevitably, arguments ensue between those who take all of this contemplation a little too seriously. These arguments typically stem from disagreement over what deserves to be declared “best.” Rarely does it pivot on “what” is supposed to mean.
However, just as 2016 has proven extraordinary for so many other reasons, this year’s most interesting year-end pop-culture debate concerns whether Ezra Edelman’s O.J.: Made In America should be considered a great film or a great TV show.
That O.J.: Made In America is great seems to be more or less agreed upon — a Metacritic score of 96 (second only to the most recent season of Rectify) somehow doesn’t fully convey the universal acclaim the five-part documentary garnered. For me, it was the best thing I saw in 2016, no matter the medium, in part because nothing else came close to covering as many different bases simultaneously. O.J.: Made In America tells deeply fascinating stories about race, gender, sports, celebrity culture, the legal system, the media, domestic violence, Los Angeles, the L.A. riots, the weird underbelly of the sports memorabilia industry, Roy Firestone, and ABC variety shows from the ’70s and ’80s.
But is the seven-and-a-half-hour O.J.: Made In America a TV show or a movie? For some — mostly critics and other shadowy figures who hand out awards — pinning Made In America to a specific medium has taken on outsized importance, perhaps because 2016 was a watershed year in the dissolution of distinctions such as “movie” and “TV show.”
After all, this was a year in which TV shows such as Game of Thrones, Stranger Things, and Westworld felt more like legitimate blockbusters than anything released during the putrid summer movie season. Meanwhile, top-grossing films like Captain America: Civil War, Suicide Squad, and Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice were essentially super-sized episodes in ongoing, over-arching franchises. In 2016, TV looked like movies, and movies acted like TV. The response to O.J.: Made In America is part of this cognitive dissonance. If one of the year’s top Oscar contenders, Manchester By The Sea, can be acquired at Sundance by a streaming service, Amazon, why can’t a documentary produced for ESPN similarly aspire to cinematic prestige?
The Oscars unsurprisingly factor in this conversation, as O.J.: Made In America was screened briefly in theaters so that it would merit Oscar consideration, a gambit that so far has proven successful. Some film critics have followed suit by including O.J.: Made In America on their year-end lists, along with Beyonce’s “visual album” Lemonade, provoking a renewal of the never-ending bugaboo about what should and should not be considered cinema.
On one hand, Made In America is structured like a TV show, with five 90-minute episodes that function both as chapters in a larger story and self-contained entities that are satisfying in their own right. I’ve now watched O.J.: Made In America three times, two of which were out of order, mostly because part five, which charts O.J. Simpson’s stunning post-trial downfall, is the most incredible section of the documentary and the one I’m most excited to re-watch.
But the sweep of Made In America also is undeniably grand and cinematic, taking in the full breadth of a weighty, complex subject in the manner of landmark epic documentaries such as Claude Lanzmann’s nine-hour Shoah and Marcel Ophuls’ four-and-a-half-hour The Sorrow and the Pity, to which O.J.: Made In America has been compared.
The film vs. TV debate as it relates to O.J.: Made In America feels like an extension of this year’s dialogue over the so-called “death of film,” which at heart was really about the end of film exceptionalism, i.e. the assumption that visual content takes on different attributes and degrees of importance based on how it is created and where it is consumed. But as technology and the economics of the entertainment industry have all but eliminated differences in the how and the where of what we watch, the arbitrary line between TV and film seems more and more like a matter of semantics.
For film partisans, the “death of film” signifies the diminished profile of visual content that is presented in 90 to 150-minute packages expressly for consumption in movie theaters. It is the shrinking of a tradition that is familiar and tethered to a storied history. I also have reverence for that tradition, but ultimately, placing too much thought or concern on distinctions such as “TV vs. movie” in 2016 seems a little, well, 20th century. Clearly, if you love visual content, we are living in boom times — it’s never been easier to see more good stuff than now. So why get hung up on nomenclature? (Even if that nomenclature is as icky as “visual content.”)
Many of the traditions that I was raised with — TV networks, physical albums, the knee-jerk dismissal of song lyrics as literature — now exist as simply another option. Networks coexist with Netflix, Spotify playlists coexist with vinyl albums, and Bob Dylan is now enshrined with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Pablo Neruda.
That O.J.: Made In America screened in actual theaters shows that movie prestige hasn’t been completely subsumed by the push for on-demand convenience. Winning an Emmy is nice, but it’s no Oscar, though O.J.: Made In America might very well win both. Both is the prevailing cultural stance of 2016.
In this way, O.J.: Made In America not only stands apart for its quality, but also for containing so many multitudes. It is a Shakespearean tragedy; a surreal court room drama; a journalistic exposé; a trenchant essay about the stagnant state of race relations; the most gut-wrenching sports movie since Raging Bull; the most illuminating retelling of the American self-invention myth since Citizen Kane; and, whenever defense attorney Carl Douglas is on-screen, a darkly hilarious slapstick comedy about gaming a flawed, corrupt system.
Watching O.J.: Made In America is like binging on your entire Netflix queue at once; you could make a top 10 list from all of the different narratives that it touches on. But however you slot O.J.: Made In America, just be sure to classify it as a masterpiece.
