O.J. Simpson’s hidden-camera show Juiced was built around making unsuspecting people believe something ridiculous was happening in front of them. Newly released footage suggests one staged confrontation became uncomfortable for the people making the show, too.
A preview from Investigation Discovery’s new docuseries O.J. Unseen: Exploitation of Evil revisits an argument involving Simpson and producer-director Todd Lewis during the troubled production. TMZ reports that Simpson calls Lewis racist during the exchange, while Lewis now says the moment stopped feeling entirely theatrical.
Lewis remembers looking at Simpson and seeing genuine anger in his eyes. Although he does not say Simpson attacked him, Lewis says he became uncertain about what might happen next even though the confrontation had begun inside a show where manufactured conflict was part of the premise.
The footage is resurfacing more than two decades after Juiced was made and two years after Simpson’s death. The four-part documentary uses previously unseen production material and interviews with people who worked on the project to reconstruct how a celebrity hidden-camera concept became one of reality television’s strangest experiments.
Todd Lewis Says the Anger Stopped Feeling Staged
The new clip returns Lewis to a production that routinely asked performers to provoke reactions around Simpson. During this particular sequence, the argument escalated when Simpson accused Lewis of being racist.
Lewis says the accusation genuinely upset him. He also remembers becoming cautious about how forcefully to respond because he did not want to push Simpson beyond the boundaries of what had started as a staged confrontation.
The two continued arguing until, in Lewis’ recollection, the mood changed. “I saw anger in his eyes,” he says in the documentary preview, adding that he no longer knew what might happen next.
The Singer Audition Prank Was Strange From the Beginning
Comedian Harmon Leon, who worked alongside Simpson on Juiced, described a similarly chaotic singer-and-dancer audition setup years before the new documentary. In a 2014 VICE essay, Leon recalled performers arriving for what they believed was an audition for a celebrity music video without initially knowing the celebrity was Simpson.
Leon said his role was to deliberately sabotage the audition while dressed as a character named Power, start arguing with Simpson and eventually shove him on cue. Simpson had encouraged the physical beat himself, Leon recalled, before the unsuspecting participants were eventually told they had been “Juiced.”
The same essay portrays a production that became difficult almost immediately. Leon described complaints about Simpson arriving late, resisting wardrobe requests and failing to follow planned improvisational beats, leaving the crew scrambling to make some of the pranks work.
Other setups created their own risks. Leon recalled one golf-course prank in which an angry golfer raised a club while Leon waited for Simpson to reveal the hidden cameras, an example of how a format built around deliberately provoking strangers could become unpredictable even without Simpson himself losing his temper.
‘Juiced’ Is Now the Subject of a Four-Part Documentary
Juiced emerged during the era when celebrity hidden-camera shows such as Punk’d had made elaborate public pranks a mainstream format. Simpson appeared in disguises, played himself in other segments and participated in stunts that deliberately leaned on his notoriety.
The most infamous involved a white Ford Bronco. In the segment, Simpson posed as a salesman and joked about the vehicle’s connection to the televised 1994 police chase, at one point saying that he had made the Bronco famous.
Juiced never developed into the conventional television series its creators initially envisioned. Instead, material from the project was released in 2006 as a pay-per-view special and DVD, while people involved with the production later described serious doubts about the concept and the way it was being made.
The new Investigation Discovery documentary goes beyond the finished pranks, using production footage in which Simpson talks about the criminal case that had transformed his public image. Simpson was acquitted in 1995 of the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman; a civil jury later found him liable for their wrongful deaths.
O.J. Unseen: Exploitation of Evil premieres Sept. 7 at 9/8c on Investigation Discovery and continues Sept. 8 as a four-part, two-night event. Episodes will also be available through HBO Max.