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'The Fix' Sounds Oddly Familiar
March 18, 2019  | By David Hinckley  | 3 comments
 

In every tragedy, there are secondary victims whose plight, however downplayed, misunderstood, or downright ignored, creates real human pain.

The Fix, a 10-part limited series that premieres Monday at 10 p.m. ET on ABC, draws our attention to one of those victims in the O.J. Simpson murder case: Marcia Clark, the prosecutor whose team failed to convince a jury in 1995 that Simpson had murdered his ex-wife Nicole and her friend Ronald Goldman.

Unlike FX’s acclaimed American Crime Story documentary a few seasons back, The Fix technically isn’t a revisitation of the O.J. murder case. All the characters, for instance, have different names. The lead prosecutor – and focal point – is named Maya Travis (Robin Tunney, top).

The story in The Fix revolves around Sevvy Johnson (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, top), a famous and highly successful African-American movie star who was tried eight years earlier for the murder of his younger white wife.

He was acquitted, despite seemingly strong forensic evidence, because his oily lawyer Ezra Wolf (Scott Cohen, right, with Akinnuoye-Agbaje) skillfully played the racial injustice card.

Now, who could possibly think this fictional story has any parallels in real life?

Anyhow, Sevvy lost some gigs in the aftermath of the trial, but he’s still living large in the Southern California hills. He has a daughter in college, and he recently took up with her roommate, Jessica (Taylor Kalupa).

Then one day Jessica was found dead, stabbed to death in much the same way as Sevvy’s ex-wife.

This news takes a little while to reach Maya who left the prosecutor’s office and now lives on a Northwestern ranch with a handsome, wealthy, good-hearted guy named Riv (Marc Blucas). It took a long time, Maya explains, but she finally felt she was healing from the wounds of the trial and the crushing high-pressure scrutiny it put her under.

She does suspect this new killing confirms her unwavering conviction that Sevvy committed the first one. But she has no inclination to get any more involved until she gets a call from Andre (Adam Rayner), who worked with her in the first trial.

Andre remained in the prosecutor’s office, and he’ll be running the new case even though he’s not the main bossman. That would be Charlie Wiest (Breckin Meyer), a lightweight who has none of the institutional memory essential to go up against Sevvy and Wolf again.   

Andre says the magic words to Marcia, er, Maya: This is your second chance, your shot at a do-over. It’s the rematch we never thought we’d get.

It takes Maya less than one commercial break to bite. After all, how many times in life do we get an opportunity like this? How many times has the real-life Marcia Clark, like all of us when we think about bad moments in our lives, fantasized about how to even the score?

To be fair, The Fix doesn’t focus only on Maya. With ten episodes, Akinnuoye-Agbaje gives us an intriguing portrait of Sevvy, and of course, there are romantic subplots as well. Andre and Maya were an item back at the time of the first trial, for instance, a connection of which Riv is aware.

We also get a good number of investigative twists and high-stakes chess moves among the key players. The internal politics of the prosecutor’s office threaten, from the beginning, to complicate the case for Maya, while Ezra Wolf’s façade of ultra-confidence turns out to hide potentially troublesome secrets.

But in the end, this is Maya’s story. We revisit what she went through during the first trial. We learn how long and painful the healing process was. We see her brilliance and steely determination now that fate has taken this unexpected, albeit tragic, turn.

Marcia Clark has written books about the O.J. case and consulted on previous television projects. For The Fix, she came up with the idea, serves as executive producer and co-wrote at least the first episode.

If she can’t rewrite history, she can rewrite television – and lest cynics suggest she’s doing all this as personal therapy, it’s equally true that she’s also apparently giving the people what they want.

 
 
 
 
 
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