Can American Manhunt: O.J. Simpson say anything new using the same old framework?

The crime
On June 12, 1994, OJ Simpson murdered his ex-wife Nicole Brown and her acquaintance, Ron Goldman.

In doing so, he ushered American culture under a bell jar in which we arguably dwell to this day.

The story
I was under the impression that American Manhunt: O.J. Simpson would be primarily about, you know, the manhunt – the notorious low-speed chase that drew the attention of nearly 100 million viewers on June 17, 1994 and turned the murders of Brown and Goldman into the trial of the century. (Or of the end of the century, anyway.)

I would consider such a documentary superfluous, since Brett Morgen’s episode of 30 For 30 on that long weird day already exists – but American Manhunt isn’t that. It’s a four-part look at the entire case, from the discovery of Brown and Goldman’s bodies through the investigation, the chase, the seemingly endless trial, and the verdict.

That too is superfluous, in my opinion, since OJ: Made In America also already exists, and since you’ll see many of the same commentators in AM:OJS you would see in OJ:MIA. 

You’ll see a lot of the same footage you’d have seen in MIA as well. But there is a lot of footage I don’t recall seeing before; there is more information about blood evidence that wasn’t presented at trial, and different commentary from familiar case figures; and there is Christopher Darden, probably the most notable talking-head absence in Made In America. 

Is that enough to make AM:OJS worth watching? Honestly: I don’t know.

The country’s most notorious houseguest, Kato Kaelin, in another overthought shot comp. (Netflix)

I’ve only gotten halfway through, but so far, the series is very watch-able, I’ll say that. It’s also overdirected – Floyd Russ, who also helmed the Boston-Marathon-bombing iteration of American Manhunt, gets impressive access to people and footage, but has maaaaybe seen too many other Netflix docuseries that feature

• scene transitions involving static/color-bar animation, set in vintage TVs seemingly plunked down on street corners or warehouses
• meta shots of interviewees coming to sit in their chairs on set, in shot compositions that leave all the cables and lighting reflectors visible
• snark, for lack of a better term, that doesn’t quiiiite land, like
  • juxtaposing a neighbor of Brown’s testifying that he’d stayed up to watch The Dick Van Dyke Show alongside a scene in which DVD himself is wearing a pair of black gloves and complaining that he looks like a strangler
  • using blood drops to animate a crime-scene map
  • bitchy “you guessed it: not entered into evidence” chyrons on evidence photos

For the record, I don’t have a per se problem with true-crime projects eye-rolling screw-ups or bad takes from 30 years ago; this isn’t about Russ showing insufficient piety. It’s more that, especially in the case of those “amirite?”-y chyrons, what AM:OJS does try to do differently ends up hanging a light on what it – and any other post-MIA look at this case – should do differently in order to justify their existences.

Let’s take the second episode’s exegesis of Simpson’s farewell letter, as haltingly read by Robert Kardashian during Simpson’s flight. It includes more of the letter than these docs usually do, but lingers on it too long, and bolsters it with the same old “narcissistic admission of guilt” commentary we’ve heard a jillion times. 

At the same time, though, Carl E. Douglas is back in the TH seat for AM:OJS, and has a pretty interesting and – even though the majority of his co-counsels and the defendant are gone now – very lawyer-ily euphemistic description of the letter, and I couldn’t help wondering what AM:OJS would look like if it took half a dozen razor-thin slices of the case, half a dozen pieces of evidence or…I don’t know, totems of the case and drilled down on it that way. 

Or put the forensics witnesses all around one table for an episode, and then Darden and Douglas at one table for an episode, and then all the news people. (Not Geraldo Rivera, maybe, but you really could do at least a feature doc on Zoey Tur, Marika Gerrard, and all the other people who won awards on the backs of the case.)

Or just give Douglas a show. Call it Trial Dogs. I’d watch every episode.

I don’t know how much the violent deaths of Brown and Goldman have left to tell us, 30 years after the verdict and over a decade after other documentaries set gold standards for how to understand true crime as history.

I don’t think there’s nothing left. I don’t think Russ does a bad job with a generalist series clearly designed as Netflix genre IP, and I don’t think this is a bad starting point for people just now coming to the case.

But I don’t think you need to prioritize AM:OJS. I’ll finish out the series and report back if anything changes that assessment, but…I don’t foresee that happening.

American Manhunt: O.J. Simpson drops Wednesday January 29 on Netflix.

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