DAZE OF OUR LIVES
AFTER O.J. SIMPSON’S TRIAL, AN INSATIABLE APPETITE FOR REALITY TV TOOK HOLD OF OUR IMAGINATIONS
People turned off their soap operas and flipped to Court TV. They developed an unexpected taste for round-the-clock news coverage of the same story. You can thank, or blame, O.J. Simpson for everything that has happened to television — including Kim Kardashian.
Simpson’s flight in a white Ford Bronco in June 1994 was watched by an estimated 95 million viewers. Show people something almost too absurd to be believed — the Bronco used a turn signal at one point when exiting off the highway — and they would watch. Producers and Hollywood executives were paying attention.
“That was, in many ways, the beginning of many things on TV,” said Mary Murphy, a longtime entertainment journalist who worked in Los Angeles when Simpson was charged and ultimately acquitted of the murder of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend, Ron Goldman.
Viewers tuned in en masse to Court TV to watch more than eight months of proceedings in O.J. Simpson’s 1995 murder trial, bolstering the culture’s appetite for true crime. The 24/7 cable news cycle became a permanent fixture. But the spectacle also helped shape another emerging genre, reality TV.
No need to pay legions of actors, writers and producers to dream up outlandish scenarios. Susan Lee, then an NBC executive overseeing daytime television, told the Los Angeles Times in 1995 the trial was “one of the best soap operas ever seen on television” — and that actual soap ratings took a huge dive while it was on.
“It was kind of a new way of being famous,” said Brian Graden, who oversaw programs such as Cops and America’s Most Wanted as a Fox senior vice-president of development at the time of the trial. Later, when he worked as an executive at MTV during the success of The Real World, he remembered a student during a focus group ask something like, “Why would I watch people pretend to be something if I could watch people who are the real thing?”
As the story unfolded, the tabloids invested heavily in trying to get every twist and turn, often leaving mainstream news in the dust. “There was unimaginable pressure on everybody in Los Angeles working for every news organization to get scoops,” said Michael Socolow, who is now a media history professor at the University of Maine.
“After O.J., what they realized is they could obtain enormously high ratings with very cheap production costs, no actors, no producers, no writers and no sets,” said Socolow. “I don’t think people realized how cheap the O.J. Simpson production was.”
The trial also had “a narrative arc that was building to a climax,” he said, combining several popular television formats — sports, game show, mystery — into one.
“Everyone was glued to their TV set ... it seduced people into watching live,” Murphy added. “(Producers) realized that celebrities can just be born — and reality stars can be born right there in a courtroom.”
One of them was Kato Kaelin, who almost was comic relief during the trial, inspiring Saturday Night Live spoofs. He would spend many years afterward appearing on reality shows, from Celebrity Boot Camp to Celebrity Big Brother. Another sudden star was Faye Resnick, who showed up on The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.
“The Kardashians emerged thanks to the name recognition from that trial,” said Robert Thompson, a television and popular culture professor at Syracuse University’s Newhouse School. The late Robert Kardashian, Simpson’s close friend and one of his defence attorneys, became a household name. That was enough to provide a boost to his ex-wife, Kris Jenner, and her children when they debuted on E! series Keeping Up with the Kardashians in 2007 — which not only made the family superstars, but ushered in countless spinoffs and copycat series about wacky families.
The domino effect would play out for the next two decades. Networks like Bravo and TLC spawned subcultures of obsessives. And a certain host of The Apprentice used his show to rehabilitate his image from tabloid has-been into savvy businessman, which he then leveraged into a successful run for the White House.
Thompson doesn’t think the Simpson trial should be given too much credit for the explosion of reality TV. The Real World had already been on MTV for a few years. Cops had been on Fox since the 1980s and Court TV had another big ratings hit, the trial of the Menendez Brothers in 1993. The genre didn’t really explode until years after the trial, with early-2000s hits like Big Brother and Survivor.
But the trial “trained all these newsgathering institutions, on how they could have a single story become an entire business model during the lifespan of that single story,” Thompson said.