Sarah Paulson, come get your Emmy. Paulson was at the center of “Marcia, Marcia, Marcia,” an episode so good that I wish The People v. O.J. Simpson would give equal time to all the terrific actors in its ensemble. Imagine an hour with John Travolta’s Robert Shapiro. Imagine the ties, the squinting, the outbursts. My god, imagine the mugging.
Any episode that revolves around one character requires a lot of heavy lifting from an actor, and Paulson luckily is more than up to the task. This is some of the best flat-out acting I’ve seen all year, and she really picks apart what makes Marcia who she is. All my complains about American Horror Story notwithstanding, it significantly boosted Paulson’s profile, and for that I’m thankful, because it means she gets great work like this.
The male gaze features prominently in “Marcia,” whether its the way O.J.’s defense team stares her down as she walks in late to court, or in the abhorrent tabloid coverage of her. “What we see in Marcia Clark,” says one talking head, “is frump incarnate.” Obviously, this is, as Gil points out, sexist, inappropriate, and horrific. But it’s part of the sad nature of celebrity. In the last two weeks, The People v. O.J. Simpson has tackled race and the media, two topics it would be easy to overexaggerate. How, then, has the show been so successful with it? One could chalk it up to the deliriously good writing, or just the general talent behind the show. It’s truly impressive.
Seeing Marcia get caught in the maw of tabloid judgment is frankly sickening to watch. It was a smart move on the show’s part, to spend five episodes humanizing Marcia and getting us to sympathize with her, and then present an episode like this one, where she is judged and ridiculed for the entire hour. We see her go in for a makeover and emerge with her now-iconic perm, only to be greeted with tabloid headlines like CURLS OF HORROR. And to make things worse, the convenience store checkout clerk makes a sexist crack about her buying tampons, after Johnnie Cochran derided her for leaving court to take care of her kids. There was no “nice” side to the O.J. trial, but man, this might be the ugliest side yet.
But “Marcia, Marcia, Marcia” isn’t just an hour of The People shitting all over Marcia Clark. There are some wonderfully empowering moments here, none more so than when Marcia publicly takes Cochran to task for his boneheaded statements.
The particulars of the trial are well-represented too. Mark Fuhrman finally takes the stand, and while Marcia’s cross-examination of him goes all right, things get a little more intense when F. Lee Bailey jumps into the fray. In one of the most emotionally and racially charged scenes of the TV season, Bailey grills Fuhrman over his use of the n-word, repeating it over and over. It’s a tough scene to watch, for reasons that Bailey himself articulates: “It’s the most powerful word in the English language, and I’m going to impale him on it.”
In the last few weeks, The People v. O.J. Simpson has gone from damn good to appointment television. At first I was surprised by the show’s sheer competence. But these last two episodes have shown it to be one of the best shows on the air.
A Few Thoughts
- Marcia’s ex husband Gordon might as well have been twirling a mustache, right?
- I loved Cochran’s foreboding delivery of “Six hours…in Simi Valley.” For those of you not from California, that sounds like both an accusation and a sentence.
- I loved Robert Shapiro’s stoic thumbs up to Marcia when she walked in with her new haircut.
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