O.J. Simpson: The Lost Confession: Was Fox’s American Idol Counter Genius or Gross?
It seems Fox had a clear goal Sunday night: the network would not lose in the ratings to ABC, which was premiering its reboot of American Idol. It’s an understandable impulse; after all, it was Idol that allowed Fox to really challenge the Big Three networks, ABC, NBC, and CBS, for total television dominance.
But Fox’s specific strategy for beating ABC—by debuting a previously taped, never aired O.J. Simpson interview in a special called O.J. Simpson: The Lost Confession—did not come without controversy. As one critic put it, “O.J. Simpson: The Lost Confession is the programming equivalent of finding your meth-addict buddy on the floor of his apartment, face-down in a puddle of his own sick.”
The Lost Confession centered on an interview conducted in 2006 by Judith Regan during the publicity push for the ultimately shelved book If I Did It, in which Simpson allegedly explained how he would have murdered his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend Ron Goldman, if he were the perpetrator. (Simpson was infamously acquitted of the murders in 1995, though he was later found responsible for both deaths in a civil lawsuit in 1997.) The program also featured a panel discussion about the interview, led by Soledad O’Brien.
As Entertainment Weekly notes in its review, the backlash to Regan’s interview was so severe 12 years ago that Fox decided not to air it; in fact, as several critics noted, the controversy even elicited a rare public apology from Rupert Murdoch himself. Evidently, though, these are different times. Even now, years after it legitimized itself as a network by distancing itself from the highly rated but lurid reality specials of its past, it seems Fox couldn’t resist the siren call of exploitative ratings gold—at least, not when Idol, the former jewel in Fox’s crown, was moving to another network.
So, was there any value to the special? That depends on who you ask. The New York Times offered a more charitable assessment than some critics, venturing that while the program was definitely morally horrifying, it was also gripping and an important piece of cultural history. “Early on, especially, the recurring reaction shots of a crying Ms. Shakti Chen border on the exploitative,” Noel Murray writes. “There’s an extent to which Fox is trying to have it both ways here: cashing in on a valuable piece of tape from its archives, while trying to do some good with it. But on balance, it’s better to have this interview out in the world, rather than locked away. It’s a piece of broadcasting and cultural history, which supplements all the other O.J. Simpson coverage that filled the airwaves last year. As unpleasant as The Lost Confession is—and though it doesn’t offer any definitive closure—it’s still an illuminating part of a story that’s been captivating us for more than two decades now, with no signs of losing its pull.”
But to voices like E.W.’s Kristen Baldwin, the damage outweighed whatever attempts Fox made to turn this interview into anything but naked profiteering. To Baldwin, the presence of a panel that viewed Simpson critically simply did not make up for the fact that Fox “gave O.J. Simpson a platform to paint Nicole Brown as a ‘confrontational’ woman who instigated drama with him and ‘had been in her share of fights’; as a drug user who slept around and hosted sex parties; as a woman who wore an ‘inappropriate’ outfit to her daughter’s dance recital.”
And as The Hollywood Reporter put it, “Watching Simpson delivering his usual smooth-talking performance in the special (why wasn’t he this good an actor when he was actually acting?) will only make you hate him all the more. Fox has inevitably publicized the show as featuring his confession to the horrific crimes, coyly covering their tracks by adding a question mark. And yes, he does confess, pretty much, although he makes sure to describe it as ‘purely hypothetical.’ What’s amazing is that the confession is not even the most infuriating part of the interview.”
Monday’s ratings aren’t out yet, so we don’t know whether Fox’s focus-stealing ploy worked. But the main point critics are making applies either way: Lost Confession was damaging enough that no amount of ratings success can really excuse its release. On CBS This Morning, Gayle King objected to Simpson’s “hypothetical play-by-play” of how he (might have!) committed murder (if he’d committed murder), calling attention back to the two people whose interests and families seem to have somehow paradoxically been lot in all this: “I just think that is pretty disgusting,” she said. “And if I was the Goldman family, Nicole’s family, it would make my blood boil.”
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