Get Your True Crime Fix with the Gritty Trailer for ESPN’s O.J. Simpson Documentary
‘O.J.: Made in America’ looks incredible.
If Tuesday’s finale of American Crime Story: The People v. O.J. Simpson has left you thirsting for more of the Juisce, here’s a little video you’ll want to watch. It’s the trailer for ESPN’s upcoming documentary O.J.: Made in America, which will air on ABC beginning in June, and it’s sizzling.
Here’s a sneak peek at @30for30’s #OJ Made in America, airing on @ABC and ESPN this June.https://t.co/mUn8T9ljOh
— ESPN (@espn) April 8, 2016
Despite the shared subjects, this documentary will go much deeper than the outstanding FX dramatization of the “trail of the century,” which began with the murders of Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman on June 12, 1994. The trailer above doesn’t even mention the murders until after a full minute.
“It is a much bigger story,” director Ezra Edelman told Entertainment Weekly, “one that explores O.J.’s life and how race and his pursuit of celebrity shaped it… while at the same time documenting the racial dynamics of L.A.”
It takes a lot of time to tackle issues of that enormity and this doc won’t be rushed. The five-part series is seven-and-a-half-hours long and, as Variety noted in its review, “the time afforded the filmmakers allows them to go well beyond the surface.” That means a thoughtful mediation on the role of a black celebrity in President Ronald Reagan’s America and a thorough probing of the adversarial relationship between L.A.’s police and the city’s black community. If you’re wondering why the O.J. case is getting so much attention 22 years later, that provides at least part of the answer. Some of the primary issues informing the case—police brutality and the racial bias of the criminal justice system—are just as relevant today.
But O.J.: Made in America also comes amid something of a true crime boom in American media, spurred by Making a Murderer, Serial and The Jinx. Among the upcoming shows are NBC’s punctuation heavy Law & Order: True Crime – The Menendez Brothers Murders and CBS’s forthcoming series on the JonBenét Ramsey case.
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