From: Junot
Date: 11/14/00
Time: 4:22:08 PM
Remote Name: 198.104.1.100
I might as well put in my two cents worth about the miniseries.
About the only outstanding thing I saw in it was the makeup work in getting actors who don't really look that much like the real people they are playing to really look like the real people. Especially Christopher Plummer as F. Lee Bailey and Bruno Kirby as Sheck.
The work as a whole is about "C-" in terms of all tv miniseries.
The OJ case is simply too big to be dealt with effectively in just four hours of screen time.
Even given that, though, my guess is that the first part was a big disappointment to the "normal" people of the public who watched it, and that the ratings of the second half will be much smaller than those for the first half.
What people REALLY want, if they can be said to want anything at this late date, is a thourough depiction of the evidence and arguments about OJ's guilt or innnocence.
The only time that came up in the first half was in a short scene where Dr. Lee explains why the blood drops at Bundy were so suspicious.
What the series has "really" been about so far is the power struggle between Shapiro and Cochran over control of the defense team. This might be an effective source of dramatic tension in a fictional movie with an unknown outcome, knowing that OJ is eventually acquitted makes this whole internal power struggle completely irrelevant and boring to the average viewer.
It doesn't -- and couldn't -- tell us oj nuts anything new about the case or the evidence. But so far it hasn't even revealed anything that you wouldn't expect the average viewer to also know about, or care about. And it seems likely that it will end without the creative team for the series demonstrating any strong position of the question of OJ's guilt or innocence.
But at least my web page is getting a lot more hits than usual!