It's Already the TV Movie

By RICHARD CORLISS

Are we weary of this yet? Has a single citizen of the global village OD'd on O.J.? Apparently not. Every day for two weeks everybody was talking, everybody was watching. Last Friday, when the pretrial hearing reached its grisly climax, was Day 26 of America Held Hostage by its own lust for sensation. On ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX, CNN, ESPN2 and especially COURT TV (the all-O.J. channel), the talkathon played six or more hours a day. Afternoon ratings soared 24% above their usual levels; prime-time specials were available for the law- impaired and the jurisimprudent. If you still couldn't get enough, you must have contracted Simpsonitis, an inflammation of tabloid curiosity, which has evidently attained epidemic proportions in Los Angeles; at least station KCBS- TV deemed that affliction worthy of a special news report. We have reached the nadir of infotainment: infotaint.

America has a strange taste in atrocities and an elastic attention span for them. The 10,000 African children who die each day of starvation can hardly cop a headline, but Tonya and Nancy held our fascination for weeks. Some see O.J. Simpson as a hero, not guilty by reason of celebrity. Others want him to be unmasked as a villain, if only because it solves this riveting murder mystery. Until a jury determines his fate, he is neither. He is a minor pop star -- a onetime running back, a rental-car salesman, a modestly gifted actor -- in big trouble. Perhaps in an age long depleted of kings, we can come no closer to Greek tragedy than Oedipus Hertz.

Every star needs supporting actors. Simpson's have come, almost literally, from Central Casting. Brian Kaelin, with his sleepy-surfer blondness, is a part-time actor whose films include Beach Fever. Robert Shapiro, the Rupert Murdoch look-alike, and Gerald Uelmen, a less telegenic Matlock, play bad cop- good cop for the defense. Prosecutor Marcia Clark is a former professional dancer. Clark's witnesses have a nice racial mix out of Hill Street Blues: Greek-American male nurse, Chinese-American criminalist, middle-American detectives. During recesses, big-shot defense attorneys -- hired guns who fit the western-movie stereotypes of cowboy, gambler and hard-eyed madam -- are ready to offer the predictable wisdom that no man should be presumed guilty if he can afford to retain one of them. And just as the hearing is a sneak preview of the murder trial, so these bit players seem to be auditioning for a second career. The Tonight Show's Jay Leno imagined them all thinking, "Gee, I hope I get to play myself in the TV movie."

A TV movie would of course be redundant. This was already the perfect living-room entertainment: Barnum & Bailey meets Barnaby Jones. But it was also an education in TV watching. With no laugh track, no sobbing violins, viewers had to decide for themselves how to react to this bizarre and compelling summer series. How, for example, to decipher the soul behind a face as beautiful, iconic and unknowable as O.J. Simpson's? On Friday he listened to the coroner's droning, explicit testimony of the wounds that caused Nicole Simpson's death. Raw emotion played on his features, but what emotion? Shock? Remorse? Fury? We have spent thousands of hours watching cop shows and love stories, intuiting feelings from faces. A glance at O.J. proved that there are some secrets even TV cannot reveal.