Ignoble Endings - O.J. Simpson

 

Ignoble endings: A periodic series examining the sad conclusion to the careers of some of the greatest sports icons in history.

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Joe Namath

Babe Ruth

In 1973, Orenthal James (O.J.) Simpson was the greatest football player on the planet. That “The Juice” as he was also known, had reached the pinnacle of the sports world was not surprising, only that it had taken him so long to get there. O.J. burst onto the sports scene as a running back at the University of Southern California. His unique blend of speed and power combined with peripheral vision that gave him an uncanny ability to avoid defenders earned him the Heisman Trophy as he led the Trojans to the national title. In 1969, O.J. was drafted number one overall by the Buffalo Bills. Although the Bills had been competitive in the old American Football League, winning back-to-back titles in 1964 and 1965, as the decade came to a close and the AFL’s merger with the NFL neared, their fortunes had taken a turn for the worse. More so, after the merger became final in 1970, the Bills found themselves in the AFC East, competing with the still powerful Baltimore Colts and the ascendant Miami Dolphins, who had a pipeline of young talent that would lead them to three straight Super Bowl appearances.

Simpson’s first few seasons with the Bills were solid, if unspectacular. Perhaps owing to the dearth of talent around him, defenses loaded up to stop the run. O.J. was limited to eight games in his second season but even in years one and three, where he played all 14 games, he failed to crack the 1,000 yard barrier and the team won just eight games in that three year stretch.

The tide began to turn slightly in 1972. The team was a little better and Simpson notched his first 1,000 yard season. But the following year would be his masterpiece. With a better offensive line and more playmakers, the Bills started out 4-1 and Simpson broke out of the gate with a 250 yard performance in the team’s season opening win. Seven games into the season, O.J. topped 1,000 yards and the unthinkable was actually on the table – could he eclipse 2,000 yards in a single season? A three-game skid dashed the team’s hopes of a playoff berth but they – and Simpson -  closed strong. Riding a three-game winning streak into the season finale at Shea Stadium against the New York Jets, O.J. was just 61 yards away from breaking Jim Brown’s single-season rushing record of 1,863 yards. The field was in awful shape. Snow mixed with mud and grass to make for difficult footing, but none of it bothered Simpson. He bested Brown in the first half but he was not close to being done. Although the Bills had put the game was out of reach, quarterback Joe Ferguson (who only threw five passes the entire game!) kept feeding O.J. the ball. In the fourth quarter, Ferguson pitched the ball to O.J., who followed his fullback Jim Braxton over the left side of the line for a seven yard gain, going over the magical 2,000 yard mark. In the end, O.J. carried the ball 34 times for 200 yards, ending the season with 2,003 yards. To this day, he remains the only player in NFL history to go over 2,000 yards in just 14 games.  

For this singular achievement, Simpson won the MVP award and he followed up the 1973 campaign with a solid 1974 (more than 1,100 yards and his lone playoff appearance), an even more impressive 1975, where he came within just 46 yards of again surpassing Brown’s previous record while tallying more than 2,200 yards of total offense from scrimmage and setting a then-NFL record of 23 touchdowns, and another first-team All-Pro performance in 1976, where he topped 1,500 yards. That five-year stretch, from 1972-76, is among the greatest in NFL history, with O.J. playing all 14 games in each year and totaling 7,699 yards, an average of more than 1,500 yards a season and 110 yards a game. Indeed, O.J. was so far ahead of the competition, no other running back came within 2,500 yards of that five-year total.

The Bills rewarded Simpson for his efforts. Before the 1976 season, he signed a three-year contract extension through the 1979 season for a then-unheard of amount of $2.2 million. A knee injury limited O.J. to seven games in 1977. While he recovered from surgery and with two years left on his deal, the Bills shipped O.J. back to the West Coast. While the Rams and Raiders both balked at the trade compensation needed to acquire Simpson, the San Francisco 49ers bit, sending Buffalo five draft picks while picking up the tab on the remainder of O.J.’s contract.

It was a calculated risk. The 49ers were not a particularly good football team, they won just five games the season before trading for Simpson, but with O.J. just 2,129 yards away from breaking Brown’s all-time rushing record, perhaps they thought he still had enough left in the tank to lift them into contention while the team could market his attempt to break Brown’s record as a means of goosing attendance at their games. The bet did not pay off. In 1978, the first year the NFL went to a 16-game schedule, the 49ers won just twice, averaging an anemic 14 points a game while committing more than 60 turnovers. Like his early seasons in Buffalo, O.J. was running behind a weak offensive line, but with more than 2,300 carries under his belt, the wear and tear of nine seasons in the cold and snow of Buffalo, and the injuries he suffered to his knees, O.J. no longer had the speed to avoid tacklers, the agility to cut back, or the strength to break long gains. Still recovering from knee surgery, O.J. played in just 10 games that year and rushed for less than 600 yards. Worse still, one of the draft picks the 49ers traded for him ended up being the first overall in the following draft owing to the team’s 2-14 record.

The 1979 season would be O.J.’s final one. Whatever magic he once had in his legs was now gone. He was a shell of the player he had once been and his performance on the field toggled between mediocre and poor. Relegated largely to a back-up role, O.J. would tally just 85 yards in his final five games, a total that earlier in his career he would have eclipsed in one half of a single game. In nine of the 13 games he played, he gained 30 or fewer yards. With the team on its way to matching its woeful 2-14 record of the previous season, O.J. was handed the ball just twice in the final game of the season, a loss at the Atlanta Falcons. It would be the last game of Simpson’s career.

TV Review - Dexter: Original Sin

In Hollywood, the most valuable commodity right now is “trusted IP” (intellectual property). At a time when there is more competition than ever for our entertainment dollars, studios that are gambling tens of millions on movies and TV shows are far more willing to churn out a steady stream of remakes, sequels, and spin offs than risk producing something new that might flop. Why swing for the fences when you can hit a bunch of singles and doubles by releasing Wonka (the Willy Wonka origin story you did not know you needed), The Penguin (a Batman spin off that also serves as a prequel to the next installment of the latest Caped Crusader trilogy), House of the Dragon (because we can’t get enough of Westeros) or rebooting old TV shows like Matlock, Night Court, or Frasier. 

Which brings us to Dexter Morgan. You remember him, right? The Miami PD forensic technician who was also a serial killer. Dexter premiered in 2006, right in the middle of the so-called “Difficult Men” era of TV launched by HBO with The Sopranos and in time, would include other iconic characters like Don Draper and Walter White, all of whom were morally bankrupt but had just enough redeeming qualities that audiences rooted for them. Dexter Morgan was no different. Yes, he killed people, but The Code, instilled in him by his adoptive father Detective Harry Morgan, dictated that only people who “deserved” to die (awful criminals who somehow cheated the system and avoided being brought to justice) ended up covered in plastic wrap on Dexter’s kill table.

The show was a success right off the bat. Dexter hit that sweet spot in the cultural zeitgeist where critics lauded its complex and layered storytelling and fans were sold on the main character’s duality, the strong supporting cast, and yes, let’s face it, the blood and guts. Dexter was the kind of show that both received prestigious awards and got the weekly recap treatment in the blogosphere. Its first season twist that the serial killer Dexter was tracking turned out to be Brian Moser, the biological brother he was separated from as a child after they witnessed their mother brutally murdered by a drug trafficking cartel, cemented the show’s bona fides. Most long-time fans will tell you the worm turned after Season Four, which ended with Dexter’s wife Rita dead in a bathtub and, in a history-repeats-itself moment, their son Harrison sitting in a puddle of her blood on the floor beside her. After that, it seemed like the show ran out of things to say. Story lines became increasingly unbelievable, the vaunted Code Dexter lived by was compromised as innocent lives were taken in service of keeping his secret safe, and it all culminated in a universally despised series finale that saw Dexter leave his sister Debra to die in a hurricane while he skipped town.

And you would assume that was that. Dexter would live on, be it on streaming platforms, DVDs, or occasional re-airings on Showtime, but those last few seasons had tarnished the show’s legacy, which was usually summed up as some version of “started out great, but stayed on the air too long.” But a funny thing happened on the way to the cultural graveyard. Owing mostly to the need for content during the pandemic and perhaps wanting to right the wrong of the show’s final season, Showtime greenlit Dexter: New Blood, a one-off, ten-episode miniseries. The show was successful enough in recuperating good will with fans and critics alike that Showtime not only decided to reboot the main show, but also signed off on Dexter: Original Sin, a prequel whose first (only?) season ended last week.

Prequels are tricky. The main challenge is telling a compelling story within the limitations presented by the fact that the main characters’ fates in the future are already known. Original Sin tried to walk this tightrope with a flood-the-zone strategy which produced a choppy, uneven, and mostly uninteresting result. After taking care of some not-so-minor housekeeping in the first scene of the first episode (spoiler: Dexter was not in fact killed by his son in New Blood, he’s lingering on an operating table clinging to life) we flash back to 1991, where newly minted college graduate Dexter Morgan (Patrick Gibson) ditches his plans to go to medical school (which he was going to attend as a way of tamping down his urge to kill people) and, after stopping at a job fair booth sponsored by Miami Metro, is hired as a forensic intern working under no-nonsense Tanya Martin (Sarah Michelle Gellar). Familiar faces abound – in addition to Harry (now played by Christian Slater as opposed to James Remar from the original series), we have younger versions of Deb (Molly Brown), Batista (James Martinez), Mazuka (Alex Shimizu), and LaGuerta (Christina Millian). Added to the cast is Harry’s boss, Captain Aaron Spencer (Patrick Dempsey with a god tier mustache) and partner, Bobby Watt (Reno Wilson).

From there, the story expands out in multiple directions. In the 1991 timeline, Miami Metro is simultaneously tracking two high profile killers. One has kidnapped and killed a young boy and, shortly after the body is recovered, kidnaps Captain Spencer’s son. The other is preying on vagrants in a way that suggests he might be a serial killer. All of this happens as Dexter gets his first taste of murder (a nurse who he realizes is slowly attempting to kill Harry by changing his medication as he recovers from a heart attack) and Deb is feeling isolated in the wake of her mother’s death the year before while Harry and Dexter become even closer now that the two are working under the same roof. But if that is not enough, the writers threw in a second timeline from the early 1970s. There, Harry and Bobby recruit Dexter and Brian’s mother Laura Moser as a confidential informant and in doing so, Harry initiates an affair with her and starts bonding with young Dexter.

If this sounds like a lot, it is because it is, and in trying to service so much plot, the show suffers on both ends. For example, Dexter, having never killed anyone before, is somehow a master locksmith able to break into homes and has the foresight to create a sanitary kill room but gives no thought to how he will incapacitate his victims (he ends up figuring it out during a fortuitous visit to an animal farm and realizes using a strong tranquilizer to knock out his victims is far better than his original method of surprising and overpowering them). At the other end of the spectrum, almost all of Deb’s story could have been edited out. Aside from flinging profanity at a rate that might be even greater than her adult version, she is given very little to do, but lots of time to do it, including side drama with her high school volleyball team and a multi-episode romance with an older guy who (predictably) turns out to be a jerk (she never did have much luck with men).

The choice to spend so much time in the 1970s timeline was also ill-advised. The backstory of how/why Dexter was adopted was already well known not just as part of the show’s canon, but literally in flashbacks that were already done. Yet Original Sin spends significant chunks of every episode in that past, as we watch Slater (rocking a ludicrous wig in a limp attempt at de-aging) first recruit then seduce Laura as she works her way up through the drug cartel. Her inevitable demise (just as bloody, if not more so than shown in the original series) produces no shock value and the writers needed to resort to Brian attempting to kill baby Deb as a needle mover for why the Morgans ultimately decided only Dexter could stay with them.

The weaknesses in these side plots are only slightly made up for in the main storylines. Dexter, still a newbie to the force, figures out that Spencer has kidnapped his own son thanks to a blood drop left on the outside of a box that contained one of the boy’s fingers and a hesitation cut on the severed digit. Fair enough, but the reason why Spencer, a decorated, high ranking police official with everything to lose randomly decides to not only kill an innocent child but kidnap and mutilate his own son, is not revealed until the denouement to the case. Initially, it seems he is using the kidnapping as a pretext to go after drug dealers (he even goes so far as to plant his son’s basketball jersey in the home of a bad guy, resulting in a massive shootout that leaves Bobby in a coma), which might make sense on some level, but as it turns out, the boy was fathered by another man and Spencer could not get over the humiliation of being made a cuckold; so not only was he going to kill his non-biological son, but murder his ex-wife and her new husband, presumably the same man she had been having an affair with. But again, none of this is revealed until the very end of the last episode, even though Spencer had been revealed to be the kidnapper midway through the season, with no motive for what he was doing.  

Meanwhile, Harry and LaGuerta’s unsolved murders investigation ultimately leads them to a dead psychiatrist in Tampa who, Harry learns while leafing through the guy’s files, had treated none other than Brian Moser. In the season’s final episode, it all gets pieced together. The victims were people who had bullied or harmed Brian as a child, from the son of a family who locked him in a closet to an orderly in the mental hospital who sold Brian’s medication instead of giving it to him. The final victim, the social worker who kept moving Brian from home to home before eventually dumping him in a state facility, is dismembered using a chainsaw a la the method of his mother’s execution.

And if the show had focused on the parallel tracks Dexter and Brian were taking toward their fates as serial killers, it would have made for more compelling television. Indeed, the show has always been interested in this idea, but given the chance to explore it more fully, the writers took a pass. Instead of slowly and meticulously following Brian’s life after the Morgans rejected him, Brian’s revenge tour was yadda yadda’d into a short vignette in the season’s final episode, giving what should have been at the heart of the story a feeling of being rushed and incomplete. Similarly lacking was a more developed sense of Harry’s torment over separating the two boys after their mother’s murder. As we know, Harry ultimately committed suicide after interrupting Dexter as he was dismembering a body. Original Sin hints at the guilt Harry feels not only for Laura’s death but what happens to her two children, but his sense that Dexter had some inherent “good” in him while Brian was simply evil is also hand waved in another short, close-the-loop scene in the final episode where Brian eludes arrest by overpowering Harry near the scene of his latest murder.

In the end, I am not entirely sure who Original Sin was being made for. I can’t believe it was drawing a lot of new viewers unfamiliar with the Dexter franchise, which makes some of the storytelling decisions even more curious. I mean sure, if you wanted confirmation that Batista has always rocked a pork pie hat and a goatee or that Mazuka has always been a perverted sex pest with a rat-a-tat-tat laugh that grates on your last nerve the moment you hear it, well, you can check those things off your list. If you wondered where Dexter got the idea to dump bodies in the Biscayne Bay, look no further than the friendly records custodian who loaned Dexter her boat when Deb was stranded on some random island because her sketchy boyfriend ditched her. On top of all this was a general laziness in closing other loops. When Deb rejects a scholarship to play volleyball at Florida State University, it is so she can go to the police academy, but in the real world, *no* academy would accept an 18-year-old! At times it felt as if the writers were going out of their way to do fan service on minutiae that might matter around the margins but when given limited time to tell a tight story, some high level acting talent ended up being woefully underutilized (hello, Buffy!) while core narratives also suffered. Finally, while Dexter always had its fair share of gore, Original Sin went out of its way to amp it up, from animal mutilation to child abuse and decapitations, the blood flows freely, but the psychology of why this violence is being perpetrated is given short shrift. Had the calculus been flipped, the storylines would have been more interesting.

The best prequels and origin stories extend the universe that was created by their predecessors by having something new to say about the characters who inhabit that world. Better Call Saul succeeded because it took the familiar Albuquerque underworld we were first introduced to in Breaking Bad and tilted the camera to a different aspect of it, finding new people and new ideas that created a richer landscape in a familiar place. The show succeeded precisely because it took its time developing those characters and their stories. On the other hand, Original Sin failed because it was content to rest on its laurels, recycling core elements that Dexter introduced almost two decades ago while racing through the steps necessary to broaden the viewer’s understanding and investment in the people on the screen.