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Above all, justice is p.r., and no one understands that better than the mediagenic client, whose celebrity-stoked peculiarity Tragedy captures astutely. Simpson (Raymond Forchion) is a man warped by self-consciousness, who skeeves his lawyers by protesting his innocence too much, drifts into non sequitur football metaphors and micromanages his defense with one eye on his post-trial image, berating his team for not raising the flag at his house during the notorious jury walk-through. (In a nod to the importance of image, we almost never see Forchion's face; he fulminates offscreen and by speakerphone as if, like Muhammad, O.J. is an icon too powerful to depict.) But there's a real savvy to his loopy vanity. TV is air and water to O.J., and he knows that even with a sequestered jury, he must make his goal-line stand in the media. "Leave it to the pillow talk," he says.
Is O.J. right? Can TV not only reflect but also affect our idea of justice? Shapiro in Tragedy certainly thinks so. He suggests asking his TV-biz pals to air reruns of movies in which an innocent man is framed to influence the jury pool. But the audience has to be predisposed to the message--just look at CBS's much hyped remake The Fugitive, a Miranda-era liberal crime drama about a wrongly accused man that has disappointed in the ratings. However much TV affected O.J.'s life, O.J. affected TV too, reminding us--as Tragedy affirms and CSI's machine dreams reassuringly deny--that as long as justice remains in human hands, it will never be just a matter of the facts, ma'am.