Moviefone Editorial

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  • Oprah Winfrey Goes Behind the Megachurch Pulpit in ‘Greenleaf’

    “You’ve got to have sin or you don’t have a show,” Greenleaf,” a new scripted drama set inside the scandalous behind-the-scenes world of a black megachurch that she’s executive producing and acting in for her OWN network.

    And who would know better than Oprah?

    After all, during the course of her 25 legendary seasons as America’s preeminent daytime talk show host and her journalistic career that preceded it, along with the empowering message of self-improvement she’s long championed — and often in tandem with it — she’s showcased her share of real-world stories involving crime, sin, corruption, scandal, dalliances, betrayals, selfish acts, foolish mistakes, falls from grace and all sorts of human frailties that derail people of every class and color.

    So when the television icon has reconnected with her considerable dramatic roots — she’s been, after all, Oscar-nominated for her acting work in “The Color Purple,” and was a producer on “Selma,” among other prestige film and TV projects — she recognized the rich reservoir of stories, both moving and provocative, that could be told about a fractured family at the center of a Southern church serving a large African-American congregation.

    But as someone who’s had her own church traditions loom large in her life, as Winfrey told guests at “Greenleaf’s” L.A. premiere, the stories to be told were not any sort of indictment of religious institutions — just an unflinching look at the personal test, trials, and transgressions of the Greenleaf family as they navigate their lives within the realm of a dynasty of spiritual service. Think a less flashy, more grounded iteration of “Empire,” with sermonizing and soul-saving in place of hip-hop and hit-making.

    “I’ve been hearing stories and been a part of stories and telling stories for as long as I can remember, since I first sat in church in Mississippi when I was three years old,” said Winfrey, who joked that her recitations in the pews were the beginning of her broadcast career. “Church is my root, is my foundation, is my center, is my life, and everything that I am today came up out and through and within the structures of the black church.”

    She noted that as the series — which centers around the prodigal-like return of Grace Greenleaf to her family’s megachurch fold after a long absence following her sister’s mysterious death, an event that prompts her to both reconnect with her brood and reopen long festering wounds — developed, creator Six Feet Under,” “Dirty Sexy Money”), who is white, brought a familial knowledge of the inner workings of a church to the table, but she frequently reminded him of the additional elements involved in traditional black churches.

    “We’re more than church. It is our community, our doctor, our nurse, our comforter, our psychiatrist,” she said. “So I loved the idea to use that platform of the church, and made the church as a foundation for real storytelling about sin, because you don’t have a good show without sin. Sinning, and all the issues that face everybody in their lives at one point or another — jealousies, and betrayals, and lies, and deception, finding the truth, but most importantly, the truth of who you really are.”

    “That’s what this series is about,” Winfrey, who also plays a recurring role as Mavis McReady, Grace’s aunt, who lives at a distance from the church community running a blues club, continued. “It’s about people you know, about people you wish you didn’t know. It’s about things that happened in your life and the things you’ve seen happen in other people’s lives. Being able to use this form of expression is really a glorified and sacred moment. So it’s not just about television, but using television to say something meaningful.”

    Merle Dandridge, who plays Grace, said she recognized the sensitive and powerful writing when she read the first script. “That’s how I knew that I was going to be in good hands,” she said. “It’s not tackling the church. It’s being within the church and understanding what’s going on in the church, and talking about the pros and cons of the church with love and affection for it.

    “I also felt ‘Well, it’s about time,’” the actress added. “It’s about time we talk about this topic. It’s about time that things that might have hurt people that we shed light on and humanize those stories. Maybe somebody can get healed by it.”

    Dandridge said she’s looking forward to seeing the conversation “Greenleaf” sparks among its viewers. “I think the dialogue that’s going to start from this show is one of the wonderful things, and one of the reasons I wanted to do this show so much. Because when your work, when your art can create those kinds of conversations, when it can start people having a dialogue and an actual understanding amongst people who might be on polarized lines, I feel like that’s art worthwhile, and that’s the kind of art I’ve always wanted to do.”

    Keith David, who plays Grace’s father and the church’s spiritual patriarch Bishop James Greenleaf, feels the series is an eye-opening depiction of a world he recognized well. “I knew him,” he said of the role. “When I read the script, I recognized him. I was raised in a church. I have lots of friends who are ministers. Having wanted to be a minister myself, I’ve been to a lot of churches. I’ve met this man. I recognized him immediately, and I loved him on the page.”

    “I believe that it’s going to be wonderfully resonant for people,” David said. “I think they’re going to really like what they see.”

    “I thought this whole concept of the megachurch and nighttime drama smashed together was so interesting because I had never seen anything like it,” said Kim Hawthorne, who plays Grace’s ambitious, confrontational, and holier-than-thou sister-in-law, Kerissa. “People are really going to see that we’re normal people, that the church is a church, a place of worship, but also a business, and that the first family has just as much drama and shenanigans going on as anyone who’s coming to the church to worship.”

    “I’m not preaching to people,” Winfrey told me. “But at the end of an episode, [if] you just go, ‘Hmmm. Hmmm….’ I’m just looking for ‘Hmmm.’ Three M’s — three M’s, not five! Just “Hmmm. That’s interesting. Yeah, what was that?’ You know? So I’m trying to drop little whispers of light into people’s lives.”

    “Greenleaf” premieres June 21st on OWN.

  • Robert Forster Looks Back on His 25-Year Trip to ‘Twin Peaks’

    Premiere Of Fox Searchlight's "The Descendants" - ArrivalsIf there’s any actor who could be comfortable resting on his laurels, it would be Robert Forster. But here he is, at 74, still part of Hollywood’s most successful and intriguing properties.

    After making his mark early in his career in artistic ’60s fare like “Heroes” and “Breaking Bad,” franchise films like “Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle” to critically acclaimed dramas like Alexander Payne‘s “The Descendants.”

    Most recently, the actor reprised his role as Army Chief of Staff Edward Clegg in “Twin Peaks,” with all signs pointing to the rich likelihood that Forster will take on the role of Sheriff Harry S. Truman, which as he reveals is a part he was originally offered but couldn’t accept when the show was first conceived over 25 years ago.

    Moviefone: With “London Has Fallen,” it must be fun to be a part of something that’s turning into a pretty cool action franchise — and you don’t have to run and shoot and everything else that Gerard Butler does.

    Robert Forster: I never work on the action part. I am safely away in the war room in the White House, which variously we’ve shot in Shreveport — we shot one of the pictures there, and the other one we shot in the lovely London. So these are good for me. I’m not involved in the action part. Though the action guys kill themselves to make action movies.

    It’s been a long time since I have been involved in the action part, where you don’t have much chance of getting killed, but you’ve got a lot of chances of getting bruised up and banged up and nicked up and spending 12 hours a day on a set. Movies are great in general, action movies are especially tough on the guys who do the action, but I have luckily these days become a high-ranking general. They started out my career as a private in “Reflections in a Golden Eye,” and now I’m a general.

    You’ve got another man in uniform coming up, this time a cop in uniform, playing for David Lynch in “Twin Peaks.” What was exciting about that collaboration, and also maybe a little daunting about stepping into a role that another actor had previously played?

    Well now, first of all, I am under compulsion to not speak about that role. I can now say they’ve announced the fact that I’m in the picture — and 216 other cast members. What a big cast! David Lynch, what a good guy he is. He wanted to hire me for the original, 25 years ago, for a part, and I was committed to another guy for a pilot that never went. So I didn’t do the original “Twin Peaks,” which would have been a life-changer. It’s a gigantic hit if you remember those years, a phenomenon. But I didn’t do that.

    But later, he hired me in “Mulholland Drive,” which was going to be a television series, but did not [become a series]. Didn’t get on the schedule. So he bought the picture apparently and shot some more things and made it into a great movie, “Mulholland Drive.” And this time, I got a call from my agents and they said, David Lynch is going to call you. When he called me five minutes later, he said, “I’d like you to come and work with me again.” And I said, “Whatever it is David, here I come!”

    So whereas I cannot talk about the role, I can tell you that he is one of the great artists in this business, and he does things that … when he needs something, everybody pulls hard and makes it happen. What else? He’s one of those guys who, after a shot, you hear “action,” you hear “cut,” you hear a few minutes of him rolling around in his mind, and everybody’s quiet and waiting to hear what he’s going to say. And sometimes he says, “Shoot it again,” but sometimes he says, “Okay, we got it. Move on.” This is a guy who knows a great shot when he does it, and can move on. It’s an art form to know how strong your shot is, and whether or not that’s going to fit with your needs.

    He’s an artist, and there aren’t many. Alexander Payne, also. These are good guys and good directors. And Quentin [Tarantino]. Gee, I’ve worked with some fine directors, going back to John Huston and Robert Mulligan and some good ones. What can I say about that? Working with David was a real joy, and I’m hopeful that I get a chance to live long enough to get a chance to do it again.

    At this stage in your incredibly prolific career, what do you look for? Are you happy to just find a job that lets you get out and do your craft? Or are there still some special boxes in your goals that you’re hoping to check off?

    I wish I had that list and that set of boxes. I have never, ever known what is going to come around the corner. And the first thing I have to do when my agent sends me a script and says, read this and we’ll talk about it later, I read it and I have to decide whether I can actually deliver, whatever it is their character requires. If I feel that I can do that, then we continue to talking.

    But that’s my first job: to find something in the role, or find something in myself and say, I can deliver this. Because the thing you want to do, the thing the actor wants to do is get on the set and deliver. So there are some things that I wouldn’t want to take a shot at. And I didn’t want to do negative characters. There was a long time when I only did positive characters. Then somewhere in the middle of my career I was broke and I had to take a bad guy and did a bad guy in “The Delta Force,” which was a 1984/5 I guess. And I got stuck in bad guys for 13 years. I didn’t do a good guy again until “Jackie Brown.”

    Sometimes you don’t know what you’re going to get offered. Sometimes you don’t get offered what you want. Sometimes the things are out of left field. Sometimes they’re fun, and sometimes they’re comedy. I love doing comedy. I love getting a laugh. I remember the first time I did a play in Rochester, New York. After my college graduation I said, “God, I don’t want to be a lawyer. I want to be an actor. I wonder how you do it.”

    And I got a part in a local play, “Come Blow Your Horn.” And somewhere in the play I invented a laugh, and it was so rewarding and so, what’s the word when you’re drunk? … intoxicating … that I decided that is what I want to do. I want to be an actor. I love getting that laugh. So if you give me a box to check off that says “Gets Laughs,” that’s the one I want.

    And I hope we get to see you working with Quentin again before he…

    Before he quits! Before he gets to his tenth picture.

    Yeah, before he fulfills this horrible promise he’s made. We need more movies from him!

    Those are the kinds of promises I hope guys don’t actually fulfill.

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  • Netflix’s Ted Sarandos Reveals What Makes the Perfect Revival Series

    UCLA Institute Of The Environment And Sustainability Annual GalaAre we about to enter an era where we can check in on our old TV pals Ross and Rachel as they get their AARP cards? Where Jerry and Kramer have the same amount of hair as George? When the Bradys’ bunch includes exponentially larger generational broods? Or when the latest crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise reaches the last unexplored planet at the edge of the galaxy?

    We live in an age of Franchise Entertainment, and while the film industry seems to be leading the charge on an endless stream of revivals, reboots, and re-imaginings, television, too, has proven susceptible to the twin power of brand-name and nostalgia. It’s not just a concept or a locale we want to revisit: it’s characters we’ve invested in, and with whom we’ve shared a good degree of our TV-watching lives.

    “The idea is if you can present the show so that the people will remember it and it’s familiar to them, but it’s still new and fresh for the new generation of fans,” Ted Sarandos, the Chief Content Officer at Netflix, the game-changing streaming service and wildly successful TV-franchise-reviver, told me recently. “And it’s not easy to do with every show and every storyline or every actor.”

    Although famous for its technical algorithms that help the company understand and even predict the tastes of its viewers, there is no hard-and-fast formula employed when it comes to choosing old favorites to revisit — but certain factors make compelling cases. Consider the “Full House” follow-up “Fuller House,” he suggests.

    “I think ‘Fuller House’ was a really well-formed new take on the old story, and it could exist as nostalgia, but more importantly, it also has to hold up as a new piece of storytelling,” says Sarandos. “So if we can get that sense that that’s happening in the script, or in the writers, the passion and enthusiasm for the show with the cast, that’s all that has to be there.”

    Hinting that there are even more fan-favorite series revisits in the planning stages, Sarandos said “the thing we’re really excited about upcoming is ‘Gilmore Girls.’ And it’s a whole different way of presenting the same stories.” The hotly anticipated return — spearhead by creator Amy Sherman-Palladino, who left the original series in a conflict with its then-network over a creative issue and was denied a chance to bring to the conclusion she planned — will feature four seasonally-themed, 90-minute episodes.

    “That’s another one that’s a multigenerational love for that show has never stopped — in fact, it’s grown,” he explained. “That’s kind of the magic recipe for these shows. The ones that go away, usually the cult gets smaller and more intense. But sometimes they get bigger, and ‘Gilmore Girls’ is one where the cult got bigger.”

    One of the key attributes of the “Gilmore Girls” revival that attracted Netflix was that “it was going to be true to the original, which was really important. Everyone was going to participate, everyone was coming back,” says Sarandos. But there was a more intangible lure as well.

    “The thing that I kept hearing leading up to that meeting and to that pitch was how many really amazing mother/daughter moments have happened around that show — in life and on the show,” he explained. “Women who tell the story in our own offices, in my own family, in my own life, are people who have really had special moments watching and enjoying that show with their mother, a very special part of that relationship.”

    It’s hardly surprising that television, with its in-home intimacy and its series’ often lengthy relationship with viewers, has become to look so favorably — and successfully — on delivering new stories starring well-loved characters overseen by their creators and played by the actors who originated them. The landscape of television that’s so seemingly infinite today first expanded on the power of the rerun, recycling its most beloved TV shows to fill first whole timeslots during the day and giving them new life

    “Gilligan’s Island” and “The Brady Bunch,” for example, may not have been critical darlings during their mildly amusing primetime network runs, made for enduring, engagingly kid-friendly fare in after-school syndication long after they were cancelled, and became classics to generations not yet born when they first aired.

    Later, in the advent of cable television, whole networks built their identities by re-airing shows of yesteryear, in the way MTV co-opted “The Monkees” for retro-hip music cachet and how Nickelodeon’s Nick at Nite was built on ’60s-era sitcoms, eventually spawning the broadcast shrine known as TV Land. But soon enough, viewers wanted to know: what happened after that final episode? Thus, beyond indulging in viewing nostalgia with reruns, TV fans were also occasionally rewarded with revivals of their most beloved shows, first pioneered by Baby Boomer favorites.

    The prototypical police procedural “Dragnet” was among to pioneers: after an eight-season run that ended in 1959, it returned with new episodes featuring lead character Sgt. Joe Friday eight years later for another three seasons.

    “Star Trek” perfected resurrection: following its original rabidly cult-favored but ratings-challenged three seasons, it returned again and again, first as an animated series, followed by a hit movie franchise, a succession of high-rated syndicated series and then back to network, and over again to movies, sometimes with familiar names and faces, sometimes with brand-new casts of characters; now in its 50th year, a bona fide pop culture phenomenon after humbler beginning, Gene Roddenberry’s sci-fi parable is a series again, helping launch a new-cutting edge streaming service.

    Since then, all manner of TV brands were dusted off and revisited, very often giving its faithful following a chance to catch up with favorite characters in fresh new phases of their lives — these aren’t follow-ups in title only: they’re specific continuations. Over the years, everything from icons like “Leave It to Beaver” to cult idols like “WKRP in Cincinnati” to pop-culture-reference-generator “The Brady Bunch” (several times over, always in a puzzling new format) with members of the original cast — and often the creative teams — on board.

    Today, largely kicked off by Netflix’s resurrection of “Arrested Development” — another critically admired but low-rated series with a passionate fanbase that, like “Star Trek,” only grew in stature and size after its network demise — in a clever move that helped announce the streaming company as a creator of original content.

    Since then, Netflix has become a television powerhouse, partly due to its successes re-launching “Arrested,” “Fuller House,” and soon “Gilmore Girls,” prompting a diverse group of networks to mimic the trend: traditional broadcaster Fox revived “The X-Files” and has “Prison Break” on deck; pay cable’s Showtime has Twin Peaks” forthcoming.

    No one’s being pitched harder on series revivals than Netflix. “There’s a lot of pitches,” says Sarandos, who’s entertained more than his share of meetings, but has resisted the easy impulse to make the subscription service a reboot specialist even as its vast library of series lends itself ideally to the model.

    “It’s not very practical or even desirable to do many of them,” he said, “But the ones that have worked well, I think it’s one of those ones like ‘Fuller House,’ which has been such a success because ‘Full House’ never really dropped out of the culture. It’s been on TV non-stop since it originally aired. So there are two generations of families now who grew up on that show who love it.”

    A double-edged aspect of Sarandos’s job includes taking meeting with some pretty legendary television talent with resurrection notions that he has to often say no to, which he admits breaks his heart. “It does, it does,” he shrugs. “But it’s always such a thrill [to meet with them].”

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  • ‘O.J.: Made in America’: The O.J. Simpson Saga Is Still Riveting Television

    OJ Simpson Shapiro InterviewO.J. Simpson would suddenly re-emerge — arguably now in his third cycle — as one of the preeminent, and perpetually relevant, figures in television history.

    Yet here we are, with — this time around — irrefutable evidence. First it was compellingly dramatized, and now it’s been exquisitely documented in “O.J.: Made in America.”

    As I was pondering how I could kick off this debut television column for Moviefone, just as fresh episodes of many of the most popular series of the moment have gone or are about to go on hiatus, I got my first glimpse at this powerful, impressive, and affecting documentary that prompted me to consider just how crucial TV was, and has been, and very likely will be in the perceptions we have about O.J. Simpson.

    Given that during my initial days living in Los Angeles I actually witnessed the white Bronco chase with my own eyes, it felt like an appropriate place to start. Because, as we’re learning as its retold today, the Simpson saga is as riveting and enlightening as ever.

    Earlier this year, the case for the NFL Hall of Famer’s significance in both pop cultural, criminal justice, and even racial terms was made with FX’s masterful seasonal anthology “The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story,” in which Ryan Murphy, Scott Alexander, Larry Karaszewski, and their miraculous assembly of acting talent dramatized the highs and lows of the most sensational murder trial of the 1990s, if not the 20th Century.

    Perhaps most remarkably, this was achieved with Simpson and the issue of his guilt or innocence in the murder of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson serving as a more enigmatic, less definitively rendered aspect of the story, in stark contrast to the vividly drawn character and conflict-rich circumstances that surrounded him (even the victims never makes on-camera appearances in life).

    Now, from an even more unexpected source, we have the most vivid, thoughtful, and comprehensively rendered examination of Simpson — the man, the athlete, the phenomenon, the celebrity, the abuser, the defendant, the convicted felon — that’s ever been assembled, in the form of ESPN’s exhaustive but far from exhausting five-part, seven-plus-hour documentary series “O.J.: Made in America,” an outsized offshoot of its consistently excellent “30 For 30” docu-franchise.

    Using the expanded canvas provided by the multipart format, writer/director Ezra Edelman — the award-winning filmmaker best known for sports-themed projects like HBO’s “Magic & Bird: A Courtship of Rivals” — dynamically and pointedly employs over 70 interviews and a never-ending wealth of the footage and photography that amassed as Simpson’s life was continually chronicled publicly since his collegiate debut as a running back playing football for USC in 1967.

    Edelman creates a portrait of Simpson that’s both impressively epic and startling intimate, revealing both the grandeur and shallowness of its ambitious central figure. Further, by devoting as much time depicting specific explosive incidents — the Watts Riots, the Rodney King beatings, and many more — fueling the evolution of ever-growing racial tensions in Los Angeles from Simpson’s arrival onward (the first “Temple of O.J.,” his alma mater’s football stadium Memorial Coliseum poetically long stood as a metaphorical and literal dividing line between the city’s white and black communities).

    By doing so, “O.J.: Made in America” establishes a vital context of the simmering social friction that illuminates the heated race-related issues that both informed and infected the eventual trial — it reveals how, even during the rise of the civil rights and black pride movements, as nimbly as he dodged tackles on the gridiron, Simpson gracefully sidestepped taking on an active role as a socio-political black-empowerment figure like fellow sports idols Mohammed Ali or Jim Brown, and clung determinedly to an oft-repeated credo devoted solely to his much stronger sense of self-empowerment: “I’m not black, I’m O.J.”

    What results — in the initial three hours that I sampled during a screening at the Paley Center for Media in Beverly Hills, attended by many of the figures involved in Simpson’s personal and public story — is a brilliant consideration of just who O.J. Simpson was during his extravagant ascension and his equally epic fall from grace. And a potent side effect of the plethora of unearthed Simpson-centric footage was the dramatic reminder of exactly how larger-than-life, all-pervasive and enduring a public figure the football great was well before he became infamous, thanks largely to the medium of television.

    It was television in the ’60s and 70s that brought Simpson to the sports-loving masses beyond those fans who filled the stadiums when he played for the USC Trojans, the Buffalo Bills, and the San Francisco Giants. TV coverage of football was evolving and expanding just as Simpson came on the scene, and his staggeringly athletic, near-balletic facility on the field was ready made to be captured with each new technological innovation the networks had to offer; better yet, increasing opportunities for post-game interviews and video profiles revealed the athlete as both handsome and charming, adding a winning personality to his Heisman-winning profile.

    It was television in the ’70s that made Simpson a star outside of the football field as well: his long-running string of commercials for the rental-car company Hertz, in which he sprinted through airports cheered on by perky white grandmothers and adorable white children, were successful, entertaining and pioneering: he became the first black celebrity used as an ad pitchman aimed at a mass audience, not merely a targeted African-American subset. His commercial work both capitalized on and further built up his then-distinctive cross-racial appeal.

    It was television in the ’70s and ’80s — and yes, a handful of still memorable films like “Capricorn One” and “The Naked Gun” — that kept Simpson relevant during a portion of his post-NFL career, wherein his contemporaries usually slid into either obscurity or champion elder statesman roles. Whether it be as a smiling if not especially incisive color commentator and sideline reporter, the occasional star of low-production value TV movies, or a guest celebrity on proto-reality series pageantry like “Circus of the Stars,” Simpson remained a constant, almost reassuring presence who never missed an opportunity to reassert his celebrity and likeability: The Juice still had it, and he wasn’t going anywhere.

    And it was television in the ’90s that, during Simpson’s grimmer second cycle of on-camera celebrity following the murders of his ex-wife and her friend Ronald Goldman in 1994, reshaped and refined our thinking of the sports idol as his once-deftly hidden secrets and scandals were exposed to the world. The famously riveting Bronco chase along L.A.’s 405 Freeway as he attempted to perhaps elude arrest (or perhaps commit suicide) endures as one of TV’s most iconic and memorable true-crime live broadcasts, followed by a string of breaking-news items each more sensational than the last. And, of course, the cameras in the courtroom let us all play armchair prosecutors or D.A.s as Simpson faced the unthinkable accusations against him, making stars of the real-life attorneys and shining harsh lights on the issues of race, celebrity, and justice that emerged.

    So here we are, 20 years after the seeming all-pervasive cultural phenomenon that was the Simpson trial (and its post-scripts, in which the exonerated athlete was first forced to pay civil damages to the victims’ families, then later convicted of another crime in Las Vegas which he’s still serving prison time over). And television is here again, first with the artfully crafted “American Crime Story” and now with elaborately detailed “O.J.: Made In America,” to remind us that, as our society continues to grapple with contemporary issues of race, celebrity, and justice, that Simpson remains a defining figure when it comes to all three topics.

    Even Gil Garcetti, the former Los Angeles County District Attorney who had to endure criticism and Monday-morning quarterbacking when his team failed to convict Simpson, thinks the Simpson saga is one worth revisiting at this stage, regardless of personal feelings about the athlete’s guilt or innocence at the time.

    “The case is not, in my opinion, about ‘Did he do it or not?’” Garcetti told me at the screening. “Ninety-nine percent, I think, of people who know anything about this case, yeah, of course he did it. It’s a larger issue of race. It’s a larger issue of how America treats potential star athletes at a little boy stage and elevates them to a place that they wind up believing, ‘I can get away with anything.’ Too often they do.”

    I also spoke with former LAPD assistant chief David Gascon, who, at the time of the murders, was the chief media spokesperson for the department. He was, in essence, the police face of the story on TV as it broke, and though he typically avoids revisiting the Simpson era, spoke on camera for the documentary.

    “At the time, [the widespread attention] was understandable to me because there were so many hooks in the story that were interesting to so many different slices of our culture,” Gascon said. “There was an overwhelming interest by so many people, and it never went away throughout the course of the investigation, the trial, post-trial, the activities related to his later shenanigans, to even now, 22 years later.”

    It remains to be seen if there are future acts to Simpson’s life to play out on TV, but it’s clear that, whether your tastes run toward scripted drama or documented depictions, the story, as it stands, is, was, and shall ever be utterly involving television.

    Part One of “O.J.: Made in America” premieres on ABC at 9 p.m. on Saturday, June 11, with a re-airing followed by Part Two on ESPN beginning at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, June 14. Also, on June 11, FX will broadcast a marathon re-airing of “The People v. O.J. Simpson.”

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