The Jury

The show claims that the jury is at the Intercontinental Hotel. But there ISN'T one in downtown Los Angeles. Maybe there was one in 1995? There IS an Intercontinental in Century City -- I once had a terrible massage there, BUT a good bowl of bar mix, so...even -- but you would not stick your jury so far away. Maybe it was product placement, but that seems impossible for this show, which is so, SO careful about that. There must have been one in 1995 that isn't there anymore. I am the ONLY PERSON IN AMERICA who cares about this.

The Defense

"You guys, that was the most dramatic rose ceremony ever!" (Actually, here they are celebrating The Gloves Not Fitting, and, for now, Johnnie and Bob are in love with each other.)

Sad Marcia

Whereas, across town, Gil Garcetti is INCENSED about the Glove Debacle. Marcia, does it help if I tell you I like your jacket? (Marcia is dressing much better now -- presumably Gil's offer to better outfit her has come through.)

Poker

This was interesting, and all part of this week's Bobby Kardashian Coes to Grips With OJ Being Guilty plot. He, and other friends, come play poker (under the guise of talking about the case as material witnesses) with OJ...until after the DNA evidence comes out and suddenly no one but Bobby is around. This whole throughline both lets Bobby see how good OJ is at bluffing (as Vanity Fair also pointed out), and also gives us a good in for him to ask OJ some DNA-related questions later. Questions to which OJ seriously does not have a good answer beyond, "um...I was framed?"

Poor Fung

Poor Mr. Fung is not good on the stand, all talking about DNA and zzz. Marcia knows that the jury is totally zoned out, because wow, he is BORING. And also he totally folds under the cross-examination. Poor Marcia's entire case is really not going very well. She needs to go back to the old Shot Glass Explanation. It was so clear and compelling. Also, everyone loves props.

Bobby's Many Faces of Concern

Please note that the only person paying attention to this rather damning DNA evidence is Robert Kardashian.

POOR BOBBY

AND HE'S NOT THRILLED ABOUT IT.

Barry Scheck

I appreciate how often the show goes to TV-o-Vision. It really takes me back to when I was watching this at home. (Although I was back at school for the verdict. I will never forget. I was eating a cheese sandwich I made in one of those Make Your Own Hot Pocket dealios that you get on QVC.)

Good Game

I cannot believe this happened. This seems very unusual. ISN'T IT? Maybe it's not. This is the only complete murder trial I've ever watched. Lawyers, please tell us if it's at all customary for a witness for the prosecution to go shake the hands of everyone on the defense team. INCLUDING THE DEFENDANT? (I feel like, here, Carl's face is like, "this is unexpected but I guess it's nice?")

AGONY

Basically, Marcia's ENTIRE internal monologue throughout much of this episode is, to quote her own previous words of wise poetry: "MOTHERFUCKER!"

Zing!

Except for the one sweet, shining moment where she thinks she's gotten the Jury Wheel of Fortune to land on a jury that will convict, at which point she says to Johnnie, who is complaining about the entire thing, "Toughen up, Cochran. This is the smoker's lounge. Day care's on the second floor," before she sweeps off. I love Courtney B Vance for playing it, EVER SO SLIGHTLY, as if Johnnie finds this amusing. Enjoy this having the last word thing while it lasts, Marcia.

The Dancing Itos

The fact that this trial was SO WIDELY WATCHED that Jay Leno had an entire segment called THE DANCING ITOS is, in retrospect, insane. Like, just think about that for a second. (This is also the year that Leno hired a friend of mine to impersonate Hugh Grant in a skit about the Divine Brown incident. He looked JUST like Hugh Grant. Like people would stop him on the street. As I've mentioned, 1995 was an interesting time to be alive in Los Angeles.)

Good Old Larry King

"So, F Lee Bailey, what's the deal with the jury? They were briefly on strike? WHAT'S HAPPENING?"

"No one knows, Larry. But if we get a mistrial, we are SO SCREWED."

She's Out of Here

This was amazing, and based in fact, although I don't know if this juror made a LITERAL run for it. I have to say, sometimes when I have been on jury duty, I too have wanted to shed my shoes and just RUN FOR IT.

An Offering

I love that Marcia and Johnnie agreed to stop fiddling with the jury over a gift of a cup of coffee. COFFEE IS LOVE. I mean, it's no sweet love note about your hair scribbled on a legal pad, but it's still pretty good.

Fake Cross-Examing

So, this was kind of fascinating. OJ wants to testify on his own behalf, and basically EVERYONE thinks this is a terrible idea. But they do a practice run, to make sure, with this woman who is a very good Marcia Clark. And OJ is -- as he would have been -- terrible on the stand. Smug, sort of jokey, arrogant. I think anyone who saw him be so glib with the gloves would know they could not put him on the stand. And indeed they do not, and were surely never really considering it. You NEVER put the defendant in a murder case on the stand if you can help it! I watch Law & Order!

I am also fascinated by the world of people who do this kind of prep. It reminds me of Game Change, which is a GREAT book about the 2008 election that you need to read if you haven't. It's so much better than the HBO movie, and it's really, really readable and juicy. Anyway, there are all these scenes of debate prep, and they'd say things like, "we had So-and-So come in and be Joe Biden for the day," or, "And John Kerry played Obama for Hillary's prep," or whatever (that's not accurate; Kerry did step in and play SOMEONE in SOMEONE'S debate prep, but he might have been playing McCain for Obama at that point). That has to be a kind of fun day at the office, or, at least, a very diverting one: "Hey, Janet. We need you to come down to the jail and bring your best Marcia Clark."

Comfort Him, Kris

Meanwhile, the one person who I think ever truly believed OJ in the first place has come to the conclusion that he's guilty. And he can't leave the defense team -- as Kris here suggests -- without basically convicting him. Poor Bobby is SO TORN UP about this, and that does seem like the natural reaction to realizing your friend killed your other friend, and you are actively working toward his acquittal. I do think that if I were Bobby K, I might have...come up with some way to leave the team that felt honest but didn't tip the scales. Although I think the only way to do that would be to have a health crisis, and I believe faking a health crisis is bad karma. On the other hand, he IS kind of having a health crisis. LOOK HOW STRESSED HE IS.

Hello?

And then the tipline gets a call. Guess what's ON TAPE? Mark Furhman, using the n-word. Multiple times. Also using the word "framed." And that's where we're heading. If Marcia Clark's case felt like a sinking ship this week, next week I suspect that ship is going to explode in her face.

Fug the Show: The People vs. OJ Simpson, episode 8, "A Jury In Jail"

FIRST! If you missed it, we interviewed Jeffrey Mossa and Amber Haley, the production designer and set decorator, respectively, of this fine program, about all kinds of things -- how they got the courtroom sets so perfect, the lengths they went to to recreate Johnnie's office, how they got the Heisman, and more. Don't miss it! They're both incredibly talented, and it was a fascinating look into a very interesting job. On to the episode! This was, as usual, quite interesting --although for me, I think it was my least favorite of the season, simply because, while I was interested in the juror experience, I missed the time we lost with the legal teams. Here's what basically happened: 1) Being on a sequestered jury for months on end looks like it sucks. (I have been on a jury, but we were not sequestered. It was the summer before I went to college, so the summer before this trial. No wonder I was so into this. I was still high on the thrill of having done my civic duty and also getting to spend part of the summer in the nice A/C of the courthouse.) This week, the jury is LOSING THEIR MINDS, and rightly; this case still holds the record for being the longest sequestered jury in California history (second place goes to Charles Manson's jury). No TV, no magazines that haven't been approved (and had big pieces of them chopped out), having to sit around with these people with whom you have potentially nothing in common, and not actually being allowed to socialize with them much even if you wanted to. 2) If you enjoy episodes of Marcia and Johnnie shooting each other "HOW DO YOU LIKE THIS LEGAL MANEUVERING????" eyebrow raises, this was your night -- because they basically got into a tit-for-tat of having jurors dismissed to try and achieve a jury that would give them the best chance of the outcome for which they were hoping. A few jurors were dismissed because they lied about domestic violence incidents in their pasts. One was dismissed because his notebook had notes on the other jurors (presumably for a book). One was dismissed because they got a call that she was trying to shop a book -- the Vanity Fair piece to which I link below gets into this, but this seems to have been untrue (that she was shopping it; she really was dismissed). Clearly neither Judge Ito nor Marcia knew anything about pitching your books to agents because I can't figure out how any agent would have known for sure that this person was "an older white woman," and this question is never asked. The author is in sequester, so she can't have visited said agents. It's 1994 so there is no Skype. How would she even BE shopping a book, given that she's not allowed to talk to people who aren't on an approved list? Did she include a photo when she sent off pages? That seems unlikely. I suppose the pitch could have said, "Hello, I'm an older white woman on the OJ jury," but if she went that far, why not just give them her name? There are like two older white women on the jury; you are not really concealing your identity. In real life, the tip MUST have had her name in it. (This is the first thing that's happened on this show that hasn't totally hung together, and I suspect it's because the bit where this part was explained was too boring and clunky, and we don't know the jurors' names, so they can't just use it.) Someone gets dismissed because they found a photo of him shaking hands with OJ. Then a juror goes nuts and makes a run for it, which also did really happen. (She got ostracized by the jury pool after she got their bailiffs swapped out -- she told Judge Ito that the previous one was giving preferential treatment to white jurors -- and the new dude was super mean, but she was about to lose it before any of that even happened.) This brought us the supremely comforting line, from Ito, "now, now, Juror 452." Gee, I can't imagine why that wasn't effective. 3) Robert Kardashian is the only person in the courtroom playing attention to the DNA evidence and now he is convinced that OJ did it and BOY does he feel really really really UPSET about this whole turn of events. AS ONE WOULD. Speaking of the evidence, I remember seeing some of this testimony and YES, Fung's testimony was that boring -- "I wonder what Erica Kane is doing," I thought, while it was happening -- and Barry Scheck WAS that intense and totally demolished him. And Fung actually did go shake hands with everyone after his testimony, I think I speak for Marcia Clark when I say: WTF, dude?! 4) Another shout-out to the music supervisors on this show. I probably haven't heard Folk Implosion's "Natural One" -- to which Marcia has a brief, private hissy-fit in her office -- since 1995. (It is on the Kids soundtrack. That's the only movie I've ever walked out of. I saw it at a screening at UCLA, and I left because I got so irritated that Larry Clark thought his leading actor was hot enough to pull that much lady tail, no matter how naive those girls were supposed to be. Listen, if your plot hinges on this kid calling himself "the virgin surgeon," and banging tons and tons of chicks, said kid should be smoking hot, charismatic, and, as I said to my boyfriend at the time, "IDEALLY WOULD NOT HAVE A LISP!" I have always had a lot of opinions.) Let's discuss! Also, this week, I strongly recommend Vanity Fair's fact-checking piece, which really gets into what it's like to be on a sequestered jury.