(As a reminder, these recaps will place the events depicted on the show in their historical context to illustrate how well synthesized so many of Murphy and company’s choices are.)
More than in the previous two installments, much of the dialogue here smacks of soundbite summarizing. Elsewhere I’ve mounted a defense the show’s necessary, if fantastically disliked, exploitation of the wretched Kardashian clan — who are vilified in this episode’s opening moments — while still admitting that David Schwimmer’s speech in that first scene is a bit too on the nose. Likewise, in this episode we also hear Kato Kaelin telling a jogging buddy, “Fame is complicated,” and Marcia Clark, reacting to a damning magazine article by gritting, “This is a declaration of war!” Lines like that contribute to the show’s perverse sense of satire and overcooked drama, though also come close to a yellow highlighter approach to storytelling that the first two episodes ordinarily jettisoned.
Clark is referring to the New Yorker article by Jeffrey Toobin, author of 1996’s The Run of His Life, on which the miniseries is based. “We have to stop looking at this case as a slam dunk,” Clark instructs her team. That magazine piece provides the meatiest drama in this hour, complete with an actor (Chris Conner) as Toobin. Here is the cover of the July 25, 1994, New Yorker magazine, wherein Toobin’s article “An Incendiary Defense” appeared:
The image pretty well illustrates the country’s preoccupation with the Simpson saga, exacerbated by the very fact that it was on none other than The New Yorker; with its eminence as a prestige publication, it was the furthest thing from a tabloid, even with media queen Tina Brown as editor-in-chief at the time. Fifteen months later, in the week after Simpson was found not guilty of double murder, the magazine ran a simple illustration of a half-full (or half-empty) glass of orange juice on its cover.
But this piece focused on Det. Mark Fuhrman, one of the first men on the ground at both the murder scene and Simpson’s estate, and offered a preview of the role he would unwittingly play for the defense. The Toobin article, culled partly from an official file on Fuhrman that the journalist easily obtained from the Los Angeles County Courthouse, offered by way of a short biographical sketch of the detective a rancid taste of what was in store.
“As Fuhrman later explained to Dr. Ronald R. Koegler, a psychiatrist,” Toobin writes of Fuhrman’s tour of duty in Vietnam 20 years earlier, “he stopped enjoying his military service because ‘there were these Mexicans and n—ers, volunteers, and they would tell me they weren’t going to do something.’ As a result of these problems, in 1975 Fuhrman left the Marines and went almost directly into the Los Angeles Police Academy.”
Later passages from Fuhrman’s file, described by Toobin, reveal a lawsuit that the detective filed against the LAPD a decade earlier, claiming that his job as a gangland cop “has damaged me mentally… I have this urge to kill people who upset me.” His court-sanctioned psychiatrist described Fuhrman as a “narcissistic, self-indulgent, emotionally unstable person who expects immediate attention and pity.” (The detective looms obviously large over this episode, even though actor Steven Pasquale never appears. However, his upcoming scene with Sterling K. Brown’s Chris Darden in episode 5 is, in my opinion, the show’s single most important and penetrating, and I’ll delve into it deeply in two weeks.)
In The New Yorker, Toobin published that the defense team was prepared to paint Fuhrman as a corrupt demagogue whose racist lunacy prompted him to frame O.J. Simpson for the murders. The author’s source, not named in the original piece, was Robert Shapiro, as chronicled here with a ripe sense for the lawyer’s (and John Travolta’s) theatricality. And the ultimate irony of Shapiro’s role as the inventor of this defense strategy is that he himself, 15 months in the future, would be the author of the self-incriminating quote, “We didn’t just play the race card — we dealt it from the bottom of the deck.”
But in July 1994, Shapiro’s ploy gains him kudos among his peers. “I hear a sound of metal orbs clanging together,” says F. Lee Bailey (Nathan Lane) after reading The New Yorker article. “Oh, my God, it’s coming from your pants, Bob! Balls, big brass balls. God love ya!” Lane deserves an Emmy nomination for that line delivery alone, and his truly best stuff as Bailey is yet to come.
Indeed, in an unbelievably strong field, Lane might be the most impeccably perfect casting decision that Ryan Murphy and company have made on the show. Bailey, recognized as the one of the greatest cross-examiner of his generation, is also a ridiculous, later-disbarred buffoon, whose fondness for booze is so well-known that he began his 1975 memoir by writing, “Heavy trials make me thirsty.”
His legal successes, such as in the 1966 Sam Sheppard case (the likely basis for TV show The Fugitive), are overshadowed by his old-man bluster. And Lane, a comic actor with abyss-deep reservoirs of pathos, brings all of his Penguin-like waddle to the part. The anecdote revealed in this episode about Bailey being defended by Shapiro in America’s longest DUI trial is true — so is the unmentioned fact that the trial ripped their relationship so badly to shreds that the two men never spoke to each other ever again.ew
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