Last night’s episode of the hit FX miniseries The People v. O.J. Simpson featured a scene in which Robert Kardashian (as portrayed by David Schwimmer) took his four kids to a packed restaurant on Father’s Day.
Fearing that they wouldn’t be able to get a table, Kardashian approached the hostess stand, where he was instantly recognized as “Richard Cordovian” and informed that he and his kids would be seated right away.
The scene takes place just days after the arrest of O.J. Simpson for the double murder of Nicole Brown-Simpson and Ronald Goldman.
The tragic events thrust Robert Kardashian – then a non-practicing lawyer and small-time businessman – into the spotlight as a result of his role as Simpson’s number one confidante.
Once seated, Kardashian lectures his giddy children on the shallowness of fame, and the importance of disregarding public opinion in favor of staying true to one’s self.
His words fall on deaf ears, as the kids bask in the spotlight and gush about their famous step-father, Bruce Jenner.
The Kardashians are said to be furious about the depiction of Robert as a cut-rate lawyer who was only involved with the case because of his friendship with “the Juice” (famed attorneys Robert Shapiro, F. Lee Bailey, and Alan Dershowitz barely acknowledge him in one scene), but thus far, it seems that he’s meant to serve as the unlikely moral center of the show.
At first, the series’ focus on the Kardashian family’s role in the trial was viewed as a desperate attempt to make the events of the case more relevant to a Millennial audience.
On more careful inspection, however, one notices that Kim and her siblings are always depicted as behaving in an insensitive, self-obsessed fashion, even as their parents cope with the brutal murder of one close friend, and the trial of a man so close to the family that the Kardashian kids called him Uncle O.J.
In the first episode they’re seen roughhousing at the funeral of Nicole Brown-Simpson, ignoring their mother’s admonitions to show some respect.
In the second, they chant their family’s name while their father reads what was thought to be Simpson’s suicide note on live television.
In the third, they revel in the fact that their parents’ newfound fame (Kris Jenner was starring in her new husband’s Thighmaster infomercials at the time.) might mean a lifetime of special treatment.
What was once thought to be a cheesy nod to the tangential involvement of a family of present-day A-listers may in fact be an indictment of the national obsession with celebrity that almost certainly played a role in Simpson’s acquittal, and that many believe enabled him to quite literally get away with murder.
It’s easy to see how the Kardashians might take offense at their portrayal, but more and more it seems that the goal of the show’s producers is not to take preemptive shots at the celebrity world’s easiest targets, but to illustrate the ways in which the widespread mentality that compromised the Simpson trial is still alive and well.
