A Jury Didn’t Convict OJ Simpson. Pop Culture Did It Anyway

In 2015, twenty years after a landmark legal trial exonorated accused murderer O.J. Simpson, two very different TV series attempted to reckon with not just the former football player/actor’s alleged crimes, but the impact they had on the world. The People vs. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story was the first to debut, bringing Ryan Murphy’s talent for dramatics and assembling mega-watt star casts to a 10-episode series focused on Simpson’s time in court, while O.J.: Made in America director Ezra Edelman delivered a staggering 467-minute documentary look at his rise and fall.

Both projects were amongst the best TV of that year — American Crime Story becoming a whole new award-winning subgenre of Murphy-produced series, while Made in America was so damn acclaimed that it didn’t just win two Emmys, it won the 2016 Oscar for Best Documentary Feature. (It’s the first and last time that will ever happen — the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences later changed its rules so that multi-part documentaries would no longer be Oscar eligible.)

It sometimes seems like our society is addicted to rise-and-fall narratives like Simpson’s, the power of seeing someone built up into an icon brought low. Yet so many of the social media jokes made on the morning of April 11th, 2024, when his passing was announced, didn’t even touch on the rise part. Instead, we used comedy to remember how once upon a time, Simpson was accused of murdering Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman, and even though a jury found him not guilty, enough of the country had followed the trial to draw their own conclusions about his supposed innocence.

As someone coming of age in the 1990s (I vaguely remember faking sick on the day of the verdict, so I could stay home from school and watch it live), I didn’t understand just how big a icon O.J. was to my parents’ generation — a Black man who transcended racial divides first with his abilities on the football field, and then with a natural on-screen charisma that led to an iconic series of Hertz ads, as well as dozens of acting roles.

This is a huge factor in why Made in America was such a compelling portrait of Simpson’s story — in part because the limited series was an ESPN production, it began with a full episode devoted to Simpson’s football career, chronicling just how massive a star he was for a whole generation, and why the murders of June 12th, 1994 were so seismic for our culture. Even if you weren’t a sports fan, you had likely seen a rental car ad or a Naked Gun movie (he starred in all three). You knew the man’s face, perhaps well enough to imagine him brandishing a knife.

Meanwhile, The People vs. O.J. Simpson certainly didn’t shy away from mining every documented moment of the famous trial for mega-drama: David Schwimmer’s Robert Kardashian begging “Uncle Juice” to “not kill yourself in Kimmy’s bedroom,” John Travolta gnawing his way through the scenery as Robert Shapiro, a dramatic zoom-in on Cuba Gooding Jr.’s courtroom declaration that he is “100% not guilty.” It also ended with a now-free O.J. staring at up at a statue of himself as the football hero he once was, with the ghostly cheers of a crowd chanting his name — cheers he would never hear again.

In the later years of his life, Simpson began using social media to connect with what remained of his fanbase — it’s almost surprising that he never created a Cameo account, though perhaps even Cameo has some standards for membership. (Prior convictions don’t appear to be a hurdle, given that Roger Stone’s currently offering $100 a pop for a personalized message.) Still, his attempts to rejoin the world as a public figure never had much of an impact; in some ways, his obituary was written in 1995, the years that followed largely serving as a footnote.

Those who remember what it was like to watch the Juice run down the field are reaching retirement now; time has stripped Simpson’s legacy down to one horrible night and the circus that followed. A criminal court never convicted Simpson for that double murder, but he did spend the rest of his life being a punchline. As far as karmic justice goes, there’s something apt about it.

The People vs. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story is streaming now on Hulu. O.J.: Made in America is available on ESPN+.