April 30, 2024

April 2024 Bonus Review: You're Wrong About's O.J. Simpson series

the true crime that's worth your time

The crime
The June 12, 1994 murders of Nicole Brown and Ronald Goldman.

The story
I'm not a regular You're Wrong About listener, but I dip in occasionally on the show's coverage of true crime/criminal justice – which is comparatively frequent. But somehow I'd never taken YWA's "The O.J. Simpson Trial" series along on an #oldladywalk or car trip; Simpson's death earlier this month provided the perfect reason to promote it off my "one of these days" list.

I'm glad I did, and I recommend it, but I do so with qualifications – and I don't know if I'll finish it.

"The O.J. Simpson Trial" is 16 episodes (so far), which then-hosts Sarah Marshall and Michael Hobbes started in October of 2019, with the last/most recent episode dropping in August of 2021. Hobbes stepped down from the show not long after that*, citing the emotional associations of prepping and co-hosting YWA with the experience of lockdown and a subsequent burnout, and for the listener moving through the series, there is a somewhat disconcerting parallel experience of returning to the Before Time, then moving into that disorientingly awful valley whose dimensions we didn't yet know. And the "Before"-ness also can apply to the murder of George Floyd, so YWA's re-appraisal of this case, in which race and policing in America figured so heavily, is sort of experiencing that in real time. I didn't find it fatal, narratively, but it could hit weird for some.

*FWIW, this isn't about Hobbes's presence or absence from the show, for me. I enjoy older eps and more recent ones about equally, for different reasons.   

I also haven't listened to all the episodes – I did the first four, then skipped ahead to the Bronco chase in Episode 10 – although I think I'd enjoy them, as I did the five I listened to, but at least based on chapter titles, the series spends a lot more time thinking about early-'90s Simpson girlfriend Paula Barbieri than I need to…and doesn't have an episode named for or devoted to Ron Goldman. And yeah, it doesn't have one yet, but almost three years after the most recent episode dropped? Seems like the window has probably closed. Which is fine; there's still plenty to ponder and learn from as it is. But I don't think I need to listen to the remainder.

I don't think you need to listen to all of them either, but you could do worse than a handful of "The O.J. Simpson Trial" episodes. You're Wrong About is a very good, well-paced podcast just generally, with solid co-host chemistry, so there's that, but in the O.J. series specifically, it's trying to center Nicole Brown, as well as other unfairly maligned or dismissed women who figured heavily in the case coverage, like Paula and Faye Resnick. 

And it's going to "primary sources" you don't often hear from, books and memoirs rushed to print in the mid-nineties, then mocked and shunned** thereafter. Sometimes that was eminently fair, other times less so, but listening to early "The O.J. Simpson Trial" eps, it's comforting to know that another Sarah has also treated with Raging Heart and Evidence Dismissed. Marshall also cites Jeffrey Toobin, Dominick Dunne, and other key commentators, and has a clever way of incorporating her and Hobbes's reactions to memorable video moments as well. Certainly it's the first time I've heard anything about the case compared to Felicity's "Dear Sally" cassettes on Felicity.

**I noted on Instagram the day Simpson's death was made public that materials around the case don't sell and never have. Since then, I have moved a handful of titles, but my sense is that come late June of this year, whatever's still on my shelves can probably just get pulped. 

But the comparison works, and for a listener like me, who lived with the case as an adult, the perspective a comment like that – one that might seem pretty flip on paper – brings is invaluable. The Brown/Goldman murder case was positioned as The Trial Of The Century, the most important judicial proceeding of our lifetimes – and in many ways, it was that, at least as it was framed in O.J.: Made In America, in what it "said about" race, corrupt policing, and the…human frailties of the system.

But it was also about celebrity and privilege, in ways I think we talked much more about at the time, so when Hobbes calls Robert Kardashian a "comedy waiter" in Episode 10, yeah, it's snarky, but it's also bringing the case down to a set of brass tacks we may have stopped using in the last decade or so. YWA's take isn't universal, obviously, but for Gen X or older listeners, this proceeding's status at the time as the most important story, period, and at the same time as an AV obstacle course of barely correlated gossipy trivialities – it's not helpful as far as understanding why and in which particulars it was important to American culture. YWA is able to spotlight that tawdry dichotomy effectively…and at the same time, by making a 16-part, to-date-incomplete series that occasionally loses sight of the idea that completism can obscure conclusion, it's unconsciously reflecting that duality. 

YWA's O.J. series both critiques and mirrors the warping power of the case on the "consumer" – and talks a lot about true-crime consumerism, infotainment, and the process by which some stories become “communal” and others disappear – and in that way, it's utterly worthwhile, for students of the case but also of the '90s, and of the genre more broadly. — SDB

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