Things have been cooking at a nice simmer on The People V. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story, mostly low-to-medium heat with the occasional bubble-up, but last night’s episode cranked the flame up and brought it to a boil thanks to the discovery and release of the Mark Fuhrman tapes. Wanna see people yell at each other? Wanna see people throw things? Wanna see people hold furious press conferences? This was the episode for you!
1) Listening to the Fuhrman tapes again, even the ones re-created for the show, even 20 years later, was sickening. It’s one of those things that really sticks with you — a cop, talking openly, almost casually, about falsifying evidence and beating suspects, and throwing around just about every offensive slur you can think of in the process. And it’s not like it was a secret wiretap, either. He did it knowing he was being recorded, as research for a screenplay of all things.
Fuhrman would later be convicted of perjury, but the bigger issue here was the damage he did to the prosecution’s case, both with the slurs the jury could see in the two sentences of the tapes Judge Ito released, and in the way he pleaded the Fifth when asked about the case at hand.
2) Perhaps you remember earlier in the season when Judge Ito was assigned this case and asked his wife to sign a conflict-of-interest waiver, and she looked very long at the name Mark Fuhrman before signing. Welllll, that little bit of foreshadowing paid off big time, as the Fuhrman tapes revealed that she not only knew him, she had disciplined him as his superior, and he was none to happy about it. Although Fuhrman didn’t seem too happy about much of anything on those tapes. Swell guy.
The drama about Ito staying on the case and all of this leading to a possible mistrial was very real, by the way, although it had a slightly different ending in real life. From a 1995 New York Times article:
Ms. Clark’s somber concession, read from a text rather than spoken with her usual extemporaneous enthusiasm, spared all parties to the trial from potentially crippling delays as another judge came up to speed. It may have also spared everyone a greater debacle: a mistrial, followed by all-but-certain defense arguments that Mr. Simpson could not legally be tried again.
“Upon weighing the apparent conflict and the defense desire to make these tapes the cornerstone of their case against the ability of this court to maintain its impartiality in the face of great temptation to do otherwise,” Ms. Clark said, “we have determined that our faith in this court’s wisdom and integrity has not been and will not be misplaced.”
I imagine on the list of the prosecution’s regrets, not pushing harder for a mistrial ranks pretty high in hindsight. Although, like, can you even imagine? This trial was wall-to-wall bonkers as it was, and that’s without a months-long break before a do-over where both sides would try to find a jury that hadn’t already developed firm opinions about the case that had captivated the country for the past eight-plus months. It would have been chaos.
3) All of which, understandably, led to tensions running high in this episode. Oo wee, were tensions running high. We had Darden going off on Cochran twice in court, Cochran calling a press conference to openly accuse the sitting judge of being a corrupt stooge for the even more corrupt establishment, and two separate elevator freakouts, one by Shapiro about Johnnie risking a riot and one by Darden about Marcia ignoring his warnings about Fuhrman.
Lots of people with their blood running hot and occasionally throwing things, but if I had to pick a Freaking Out MVP for the week, I gotta go Darden, if only because of the thing Sterling K. Brown does with his eyes when he plays angry. It looks like the rage is building up in his head so much that it’s forcing his eyes out of their sockets. And given the past couple episodes Darden has had, who could blame him for feeling that way?
4) Man, it was not very long ago that Chris Darden and Marcia Clark were standing outside that Oakland hotel room making boozy heart-shaped eyeballs at each other, but now it feels like centuries. Between Darden’s spontaneous and doomed move with the glove and Marcia’s repeated dismissals of his concerns about Fuhrman now biting them squarely in the jimmies, their case went from a slam dunk with ironclad physical evidence to a disaster circus.
5) Movie pitch: Disaster Circus, starring Liam Neeson as a veteran lion tamer who is one week from retirement when a mad man releases a toxin inside the tent that turns the whole audience into a bloodthirsty mob. And his granddaughter is backstage!
6) Multiple summaries for this episode featured the phrase “Cochran and Bailey hit the road” to describe their trip to North Carolina to fight for the tapes, and I’m not going to lie to you, a tiny part of me really wanted to see them on an actual cross-country road trip. Like, I knew they’d be taking a plane. I knew it. But I was still a little disappointed to see it. I had this image of Bailey walking out of a gas station convenience store in, like, Oklahoma, carrying soda and bags of Doritos and Cochran being all, “Dammit, Lee. I said look for lunch. That’s barely food,” and Bailey shrugging as he slurps on a 48-ounce cup of Dr. Pepper that he secretly poured a pint of whiskey into. I would have watched a whole episode of this.
7) I also enjoyed the thing where Lee laid it on thick with the whole, “Your honor, I’m just a simple small town lawyer” act. He basically turned into Matlock for a second. Worked out better than Johnnie’s approach.
8) The thing about the tapes being in the possession of a North Carolina screenwriting teacher who very much did not want to give them up? True! Because every part of this case is and was as crazy as possible. Via the Hollywood Reporter:
[Laura Hart] McKinny explains her decision to fight the subpoena stemmed from her word to every single interviewee for her project that whatever they shared was confidential and would only be used in the creation of factious characters.
“And I was very appreciative of all the interviewees’ honesty because I couldn’t have been able to amass the authentic work and voices if people were feeling that they could not be truthful and confidential,” she says. “So I was thankful I could find men and women interviewees in my research who could be honest, even if i didn’t share their point of view.”
So, there’s that!
9) This has been brought up plenty of times in plenty of places, often by me here, but it’s really amazing that all of this happened. Look back over everything we’ve seen: the Bronco chase, the Resnick book, the Fuhrman tapes, the bloody glove, the existence of a houseguest named Kato Kaelin, all of it. They were right on the show when they said you probably wouldn’t believe it if it hadn’t actually taken place. And, again, imagine if it had happened today, with social media and TMZ and Nancy Grace and… okay, maybe don’t imagine Nancy Grace. But still, think about your hypothetical Twitter feed as this was all happening. Think about what your relatives and high school friends would write on Facebook. It would have caused society as we know it to grind to a halt.
10) When your co-counsel insists on a trial strategy that is working, but might tear the city apart, and you’re John Travolta…
