It's no exaggeration to say that the O.J. Simpson trial permeated the public consciousness for over a year. And this TV special sets out to distill 16 months of TV news footage into a 2-hour documentary. No reenactments, no commentary, just the footage that we all saw on TV. It's a novel premise and while such a program can't hope to cover enough of the ordeal to give the viewer anything close to a whole picture, it does show just how solidly this trial had us in its steely grip.
I lived through this, but I wasn't as ardent a follower as some. So a lot of this material was new to me. And it's for captivating stuff, to be sure; that Bronco standoff was surprisingly tense. And what's really cool about this documentary is how they show all of the places people watched the coverage: at the gym, the beauty shop, in bars and even appliance store windows. Basically every TV was tuned to the O.J. saga. You could absolutely say the 24-hour news cycle blossomed here. It was a defining moment in our history.
And this movie makes for a fascinating look back at that time.
I lived through this, but I wasn't as ardent a follower as some. So a lot of this material was new to me. And it's for captivating stuff, to be sure; that Bronco standoff was surprisingly tense. And what's really cool about this documentary is how they show all of the places people watched the coverage: at the gym, the beauty shop, in bars and even appliance store windows. Basically every TV was tuned to the O.J. saga. You could absolutely say the 24-hour news cycle blossomed here. It was a defining moment in our history.
And this movie makes for a fascinating look back at that time.