Sarah Mesle and I wrote for Dear Television about FX’s new American Crime Story: The People v. OJ Simpson, which is really extraordinarily good TV:

“The OJ trial is the adolescence of our media culture. The Kardashian kids may be a tangential part of this grand drama, but their presence brings it into our present in a real way. Of all of these famous characters, these budding selfie artists are the ones we still know. Their spectatorship of these events — even for contemporary viewers who aren’t as neatly in the demographical bullseye as I am — transforms in a gnarly way into our spectatorship, present and past. Some people have called out these scenes for the way in which they score cheap points off of that family. But I don’t think it’s really about them; I think it’s about us. Their foibles are ours magnified, their experience of this history is ours, more intense, but no less mediated. In this limited circumstance, are we not Kardashians, too?”

“Are We Not Kardashians?”