Clearly this was a very cool in depth look but I think America was a little tired of the story. Between the other doc done and the A&E show being put out just before this, the story had been told over and over. That being said, this was definitely the most in depth and will probably live on in history. Kudos to the team - must have been quite the undertaking.

I give this a 4 out of 5 Netflix stars which translates into an 8 here. The very first scene had me hooked seeing OJ looking like a despondent old man sitting in front of a Nevada parole board It actually made me feel sorry for him. After finishing the 8 hours I felt numb -- the ending neither happy nor sad -- just tragic. This entire saga was tragedy at so many different layers and so convoluted and twisted even Shakespeare himself couldn't write such a story.They had a good mix of interviewees that provided insight they must have been culling these past 20 years. Carl Douglas, former Dream Team lawyer who significantly contributed to this documentary, brings it home at the end with his 5th quarter metaphor. Nicely done.The trial sections relied heavily on the prosecutors Marcia Clark and Gil Garcetti. They never were asked why this trial took 8 months and not a couple of weeks. They didn't have to present every single piece of evidence. One juror briefly mentions how she was basically imprisoned for the entire trial. Didn't anyone think this could be a problem and perhaps cut to the chase? They lay all the blame on the glove incident on Darden. Wasn't Marcia Clark or Gil Garcetti his boss?Since Clark and Garcetti were such big contributors to this documentary I felt the producers didn't want to put them in a bad light. Even Fuhrman gets to do some mea culpa. The reason this trial turned into a circus is because everyone liked the stage. Everyone wanted the limelight to last forever -- even Judge Ito, who isn't interviewed. The ring leader controls the circus and in this trial that was the late Johnny Cochran.

Seven and a half hours in length and in five parts, OJ: Made in America can best be described as "Everything you wanted to know about OJ (and race in America) but were afraid to ask." OJ: Made in America is like a giant jig-saw puzzle, and it's up to you to figure out the lessons learned (if any) among the participants in the sordid spectacle known as "The Trial of the Century." Ezra Edelman produced and directed OJ: Made in America ("OJ:MIA") and was determined from the outset to show the connection between the OJ Trial and the history of resentment built up in the African-American community as a result of years (if not centuries) of discrimination, racism and outright violence perpetrated against it. Hence at the very time OJ came onto the scene as a star football player for the University of Southern California (USC), the Watts riots were happening right next door to the campus, depicted as a bastion of white privilege.Ironically, the most popular man on campus at that time was OJ himself, who was determined to ingratiate himself with an all-white student body, oblivious to what was going on in the larger community right outside his doorstep. OJ was so determined to shed any connection to his black roots that you can hear him saying on the archival footage, "I'm not black, I'm OJ!" It was no accident years later that OJ's defense team changed all the pictures in his house featuring his associations with a myriad of white friends and replaced them with pictures of his black relatives in order to give the majority black jury the impression that maybe he wasn't an Uncle Tom, as some militants had accused him of being during his years as a professional NFL player and Hertz rent-a-car pitchman.By the time his playing days were over, OJ had basically given up most of his connections to the lower middle- class black community where he grew up, married Nicole Brown, a white woman, and moved to the gated "white" Brentwood suburb of Los Angeles. As he later admitted, he didn't pay much attention to the concerns of his fellow blacks as he was more determined to make it as a man of wealth and privilege in a white world.Edelman spends a good deal of time chronicling the Rodney King beating incident and its aftermath in order to remind us of the injustice of the first trial and the resentment it caused in the black community not only in the Los Angeles area but across the entire country. It is within this atmosphere that the OJ jury was seated. Interviews with various community "activists" make it clear that most people in the black community saw OJ as a symbol (or cause célèbre if you will), with the verdict already pre-determined, as payback for the Rodney King trial.This is borne out by one of two interviews with two actual jurors from the trial. Juror #9, a feisty older black woman, who asserted that 90% of the people on the jury had made up their minds from the beginning, not only as payback for Rodney King but as s he put it, "to protect our own." Juror #9 comes off in OJ:MIA as one of the most fascinating characters in the documentary. On one hand, she had little sympathy for Nicole Brown, unable to understand why domestic violence victims are unable to leave their husbands despite enduring horrendous physical abuse and constant psychological humiliation. On the other hand, Juror #9 is one of the few African Americans initially sympathetic to OJ who was willing to concede later on that he was probably guilty!In contrast, Juror #2, a middle-aged black woman, is much more circumspect. She maintained that, because of their mistakes, the prosecution team failed to make their case. Unlike Juror #9, Juror #2 isn't willing to concede that the prosecution team was dealing with an inherently biased jury. But even barring that, the defense team still had to get around the problem of all of the victims' blood mixed in with OJ's DNA found at the scene. Juror #2's solution is to dismiss all police testimony by basically blaming Mark Fuhrman as unreliable since she was personally offended by his use of N-word and lying about it on the stand. But the defense team argued that ALL the police (including Vanatter, the chief detective) were involved in a grand conspiracy to mix OJ's blood with the victims.By that logic, any future defense attorney could argue that police testimony is tainted since you can't trust any of them due to inherent racism. The argument of a grand police conspiracy sounds even more ludicrous considering the victim involved. OJ was a friend of the police and even though a few had knowledge of OJ's abuse of Nicole, the police never stopped coming over to his house in friendship before the murders. Juror #2 was probably right about the prosecution bungling the case but not for the "mistakes" she cites. Instead, it appears more obvious that the prosecution failed to challenge the ludicrousness of the defense's notion of a vast police conspiracy, accepted uncritically by an already biased jury. OJ:MIA documents the shock many in the white community felt at what they regarded was an unjust verdict. Somehow they expected many in the African-American community to take the "high road" and look at the case objectively—instead, it was purely an "emotional" verdict based on years of resentment—the "taste of victory" was more important than really analyzing the defense's flimsy case which was principally based on massive generalizations and crude innuendo.In the end OJ did get his just desserts. He thought he was going to return to his regular routine only to discover that he was now a pariah and eventually an inmate to boot. For O.J.: what goes around, comes around!

O.J.: Made in America is the Oscar winner for best documentary in 2016 and its well deserved. What a documentary. There is so much detail in this and so many questions answered that we didn't know would or could be answered about the infamous O.J Simpson case.I'm normally not a documentary type-guy but this had me floored. It's such an amazing piece of artistry, and being a young European I hadn't actually heard of this case before which meant that I was amazed all the way through.I first watched the dramatization of the story in The People v. O.J Simpson: American Crime story and honestly it just made this documentary even better as they're not acting. These events has ACTUALLY happened.Some may argue that it's very long for a documentary (7hr 47 min), but honestly the backstory which we get in the first couple of episodes is time well spent. It makes the impact of the final chapters of this story so much larger and makes for a more emotional ending.What made me love this story and documentary so much is that it has made me think so much about this case. I've finished the documentary a week ago and I'm STILL thinking about this documentary. That's how good it is.Wow, what a story and what an ending. Incredible. I would definitely recommend this documentary to anyone who loves film and who loves definitive stories. However, I think the documentary will have the biggest impact on you if you haven't heard much about the story and aren't fully aware of everything that happened to O.J Simpson. That being said you will still have an amazing time watching this documentary regardless if you know about the origins of this case or not.