My favorite (non-movie) pop culture of 2016!

2.) O.J.: Made in America

If you had told me in January that 2016 would feature two must-see films about O.J. Simpson, I would have laughed you out of the room. As a teenager during the “Trial of the Century,” I feel like I’m still suffering from media overload. And yet, filmmakers twice found a way to revisit the whole sordid story in fresh, compelling and relevant ways.

The best was Ezra Edelman’s five-part, nearly eight-hour documentary for ESPN. It’s so good that critics are fighting about whether it’s to be awarded as a TV show or film (it premiered at Sundance and played in a few theaters before being broadcast on ESPN), probably so they can jockey for their chance to write about it. Having watched it over the course of a week on my couch, I’m not including it in my movie list, although it would fit near the top if I did.

Edelman’s exhaustive film chronicles O.J.’s spectacular rise and fall, from his youth and college football days to his post-acquittal life and subsequent prison term. Even if you lived through the trial and watched every moment of court coverage, there’s likely still something new here. It takes two episodes to even get to the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman, and by then you know you’re watching one of the year’s most important works of art. While meticulously covering O.J.’s early life and career, Edelman also sets up the context of the tragedy to come, showing how the the entire trial and acquittal were rooted in a culture of racial strife, police brutality, celebrity worship and media exploitation. American culture created the perfect storm for the murder trial to ooze out of, and many of the things that contributed to that toxic event are still swirling in our atmosphere (and, it could be argued, contributed to our political climate). And yet, even as he spins a broad tale of distinctly American wretchedness, Edelman never loses sight of the human lives at the center of this tale. He lingers with purpose, but never with exploitation, on horrific crime scene and autopsy photos to repeatedly remind us of the tragedy of lives lost. And he ensures to also linger on O.J.’s post-acquittal spiral into irrelevance and self-parody, culminating with his arrest and incarceration. This is one of the best looks at American culture I’ve seen, filtered through a tale so garish you want to look away but so absurd that you can’t.

“O.J.: Made in America” is streaming in three parts on Hulu and available on all digital and physical platforms.