NEW YORK — Twenty years after distributors walked away from a hidden-camera prank show built around O.J. Simpson, the footage from it airs tonight.
“O.J. Unseen: Exploitation of Evil,” a four-part documentary from Investigation Discovery, premieres at 9 p.m. Monday and concludes Tuesday, with episodes streaming on HBO Max. The network set the time at 9/8c in its own promotion.
The subject is “Juiced,” the 2006 one-off Simpson made a decade after his acquittal in the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman. Modeled on MTV’s “Punk’d,” it was filmed over two weeks in Las Vegas for Rick Mahr’s Xtreme DVD label, which also produced the “Backyard Wrestling” tapes. Word of the content leaked, the planned retail release collapsed, and the show ran once on pay-per-view before a DVD that, Biography reported, citing “This American Life,” sold fewer than 100 copies by Nielsen’s count.
What ID has is the material around it. Executive producer Eric Day told The Hollywood Reporter the project drew on “60-plus hours of behind the scenes of it all getting made and a sit-down interview with O.J.” Director Rebecca Halpern put the figure at 100 hours in an interview with Us Weekly. The two numbers appear to count different things, and the network has not broken them out.
Mahr licensed the footage. He and “Juiced” director Todd Lewis are the documentary’s central voices, and THR’s review of screeners found the crew’s remorse ranged from none to considerable — Lewis says part of him hoped to catch a confession on camera; Mahr allows he thought the show would sell.
The moment both producers point to is not a prank. Executive producer Mark Koops told THR that Simpson, riding in a car with Lewis and “probably a couple, if not more, drinks in,” begins talking about the trial. “It felt like we were as close to finding out the truth as we’re ever going to be,” Koops said.
Halpern has been blunter about her subject. Simpson “should have slinked into oblivion,” she told Us Weekly. “He should have gone off and played golf and been quiet and kept to himself. But he just couldn’t help himself, and so in a lot of ways, this show is a case study in megalomania and narcissism.”
Simpson died of prostate cancer April 10, 2024, at 76. Neither the Goldman nor the Brown family had publicly responded to the series as of Monday afternoon.
In 2006, Fred Goldman told “Inside Edition” that Simpson’s Bronco material was morally reprehensible, and Brown family attorney Gloria Allred told The Associated Press that any money Simpson made should go toward the civil judgment against him. This time the noise is thin. The clips ID has pushed out have drawn hundreds of engagements, not a campaign. On Reddit, the trailer sat at 3 votes and no comments in r/ojsimpsondidntdoit, and at 1 comment in r/OJSimpsonTrial for over a month.
The scene at the center of the clips is the used-car lot. Simpson, hawking a white Ford Bronco, tells a customer it “has escapability, that’s the main thing,” and adds, “hopefully there’s no bodies in this thing,” according to footage Fox News described from the series. In the version Fox News reported in May 2006, from an “Inside Edition” segment, the line was gentler: the Bronco “was good for me — it helped me get away.”
Under ID’s own clip, the network teased a driver who says he came to believe Simpson could not have been a murderer. One reply countered with Denise Brown’s reported first words on learning of her sister’s death; another argued Simpson’s son did it. Nineteen ninety-five never closed for that audience, and a prank tape is not going to close it either.