Critics reviews

After watching this absolutely penetrating, perfectly structured episodic television study of this era-defining event... any attentive viewer will no longer be able to think of the murder trial as a contained event with its own beginning and end. This devastating television miniseries reminds you that history—personal or public—exists on a continuum.

Ezra Edelman's often operatic, occasionally textbook attempt to fully contextualise the quintessentially American tragedy of the football and advertising icon turned murder suspect... What keeps the epic multi-part series from feeling like just another binge-y true-crime number is the intelligence and sobriety of Edelman's storytelling. You can't look away, and what he shows you is clear-eyed and invaluable.

Great journalism or great cinema? I lean toward the former, but if treating O.J.: Made in America as a marathon film is going to be a requisite for granting it the credit it's due, I'm happy to fall in line. Ezra Edelman's riveting investigative saga, divided into five hour-and-a-half installments and released as part of ESPN's 30 for 30, ransacks the multi-tiered complexities and implications of both the public and anecdotal records of O.J. Simpson's notorious murder case in the mid-nineties.

The five part documentary that deepens the headlines, the crime and the court case, and digs more profoundly into American race relations via one of our most famous fallen heroes -- O.J. Simpson. It's also historically important and deeply tragic (it also goes further with the fate of Nicole Brown and Ronald Goldman), merging great cinema with great journalism -- powerful, complex. I was riveted and, by the end, very sad.

Edelman's meticulous and expansive journalistic endeavor reveals the DNA strands of race and celebrity running perpetually antiparallel in America, and how the rise and fall of football legend O.J. Simpson intersects with them both. No historical stone goes unturned, no story ignored, no voice is silenced.

Assiduously researched and seamlessly assembled, Ezra Edelman's nearly eight-hour documentary about the disgraced football star is also a treatise on race, celebrity, the pathologies of sports culture, and the criminal justice system — it is, in other words, a potent précis on this country's past half-century.

One of the most engrossing experiences I've had this year. It doesn't feel like 5 hours. It is an in-depth cross-examination of the way race and class intersect and interact in America, a topic that could not be more timely. I practically had PTSD flashbacks watching it, because it brought that whole nightmare back... It's an amazing accomplishment. It's difficult to watch at times, especially if you lived through it the first time. But it leaves no stone unturned.

There are multiple rich thematic seams here. The personal arc suggests not just Fitzgerald, but Welles: there is Othello, of course, the outsider hero with an overweening desire not just to belong but to possess; the hubris of Arkadin, that need to obliterate anything that could sully his carefully cultivated myth… Hank Quinlanmakes an intervention in the guise of investigating officer Mark Fuhrman, a racist cop accused of planting an incriminating glove at OJ's home.

The film is one of the great works of American cultural history over the last half-century. But it infuses that imposing breadth with the singular, personal story of a man who, in effect, at the height of his public life, found his triumph and his tragedy iconographically representative of an American ideal, and the dissolution of it.

There's a tradition of documentaries that dig into their subjects episodically, sometimes at monumental length. Such is the case with Ezra Edelman's "O.J.: Made in America," which for close to eight hours takes up the case of O. J. Simpson to create a titanic inquiry into race, class and celebrity in the United States. Race may be a construction, but it is one that Americans continue to live and die by.

Because O.J.: Made in America appeared between the emergence of #BlackLivesMatter and Colin Kaepernick taking a knee, there's a temptation to call it "timely," but Edelman never sacrifices the specifics of his story for trite historical syllogisms. As much as it is about a continuum of race relations, it's about the exact details of a recent, distant past when, per one of the acquitting jurors, "We took care of our own." The past, as the saying goes, is another country—and here it's our country.

A documentary about modern times that seem like ancient history, and it's made with an aesthetic to match. Edelman's deep and extensive archival research and his wide-ranging interviews have no existential element; there's no drama of discovery built into the movie. For that matter, there's virtually no drama in it at all. Rather, it's a film of information, a documentary that seems built for an age yet to come, in which its audio and video elements will be searchable.