First off, apologies for how late this is — we’re at Fashion Week at the moment, and time got away from me. Second, this show continues to be masterful. As I mentioned in the first recap, I lived in Los Angeles throughout this entire time period (and, in fact, have done so my entire life), and I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a TV show so perfectly capture what it was like to be in Los Angeles in 1994. One of the things that is great about this series, I think, is how well it captures the seemingly mundane details about this entire drama — and it was a drama on a number of levels — which give it that ring of truth. I mentioned last week that my family watched the entire Bronco chase on TV, but what I thought but did not mention was, “I wonder why the TV was on in the first place.” Well, this episode — which covers SOLELY the day of the chase; for the interested, the Los Angeles Times has a timeline of events as they happened – reminded me that, of course, everyone was watching the NBA finals.
As ever, this is not a full-on recap. This week’s (VERY LOOSE) methodology to discuss the events of the episode is Methods of Communication. So much of the events this week unfolded via phone — Robert Shapiro on the phone with Gil Garcetti; OJ on the giant, plugged-in car phone with a variety of people, including apologizing to the police for ruining their weekend; poor AC Cowlings on the phone with 911. That’s as LA as…well, as how often people noted to each other how much this car chase must have screwed up traffic. When one of the LAPD noted, mid-chase, “the back-up on Sepulveda must be unbelievable,” I laughed out loud. Because it must have been. But we also see OJ’s hand-written suicide note, and so much of the way that the events of this day were communicated to the public (TV, the paparazzi), as well as the way that Chris Darden’s neighbors discussed it, over their backyard walls, and how the public tried to communicate their support to OJ by gathering at freeway overpasses and in front of his house. It’s fascinating to see how this all unfolded without Twitter — now, would people still go out and cheer on OJ? Or would they just tweet him that they believed in him? Let’s discuss — that, and anything else in the episode.
