How O.J. Simpson changed America – and American television
It’s hard to overstate the impact O.J. Simpson, the former NFL star accused of murder, had on popular culture.
For a time he was everywhere, and doubtless wished he wasn’t.
Simpson, who died Thursday at 76, was the central figure in two of the biggest stories of the latter part of the 20th century, both of which would change the way TV covers news. The first was a low-speed chase that all the major networks carried live. The second was a 1995 murder trial that changed the way court cases are covered. This after an NFL career as one of the greatest running backs of all time and a stint as an actor.
What did O.J. Simpson do?
But it’s his acquittal in the brutal murders of his former wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend Ronald Goldman, that is, as they say, the first line in his obituary.
Of course, it was Simpson’s fame that made the chase and the trial and even the charges themselves so surreal, and so urgent that TV news upended the usual methods of coverage.
It is almost impossible to overstate how big a story this was, and how unique at the time — in an age before smartphones and carefully crafted selfies and the relentless pushing of celebrity brands, it seemed almost unimaginable that someone so famous could be charged with so terrible a crime. We only knew celebrities on-screen, not in an all-encompassing, personal way.
And the coverage reflected that.
When was the O.J. car chase?
The low-speed chase occurred on June 17, 1994, and is definitely one of those times where you remember where
you were and what you were doing when you saw it. (An estimate 95 million people did.)
I was in an airport bar, for instance, watching an NBA Finals game between the New York Knicks and the Houston Rockets. ABC, NBC, CBS and CNN all broke into programming to show Simpson, riding in a white Ford Bronco driven by his friend Al Cowlings, being pursued by law enforcement. News helicopters followed the chase from above; below, on bridges Cowlings passed under, fans of Simpson’s waved signs supporting him.
If it wasn’t weird enough already, and it was, NBC continued showing the game, but carried the chase in a little box in the corner of the screen, with the network’s main anchor, Tom Brokaw, narrating it. “Bizarre” doesn’t even come close to describing it.
There simply had not been coverage like this before, because there hadn’t been a story like this before — and networks now had the technology and the capacity to televise it live. Think of it as a livestream before such a thing existed. In the airport bar, people looked up from their beers and wings to watch, and it seemed like the coverage didn’t stop for the next year and a half.
Because it didn’t.
What year was O.J. Simpson trial
Simpson was charged with murder. Court TV aired the proceedings live in 1995; so did other networks during big moments. This seemed like a good opportunity for a sort of civics lesson. Murder trials, day to day, are not especially exciting to cover. There are a lot of technical aspects that don’t make it into an episode of “Law & Order.” I remember thinking this is good, now people will see what a trial like this is really like.
And of course, it turned out to be like no other trial
before it.
The attorneys and witnesses became household names. Now we expect to see high-profile trials on TV, no matter how important or impactful they are. The 2023 livestream and occasional network coverage of Gwyneth Paltrow’s trial after being sued for a skiing accident was simply the logical conclusion of what the Simpson trial coverage started.
Who said 'if the glove don't fit'?
The Simpson trial coverage was one thing, with moments and images seared into the culture — the bloody glove Simpson theatrically struggled to put on, for instance, and Simpson attorney Johnnie Cochran saying to the jury, “If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit.” But the story was everywhere, on the cover of all the magazines, back when people still read magazines. It was a staple of Jay Leno’s “Tonight Show,” including an ill-advised, recurring bit in which a group of dancers dressed in robes like Lance Ito, the judge in the trial, performed. They were called “the Dancing Itos.”
The jury acquitted Simpson on Oct. 3, 1995. An estimated 100 million people watched on live TV. It seemed as if time stopped while the world, a big chunk of it watching on TV, waited for the verdict.
TV wasn’t done with Simpson yet. He would be found liable in a civil trial in 1997 (the trial wasn’t televised, but the announcement of the verdict nearly coincided with Bill Clinton’s State of the Union speech, offering the possibility of another weird moment of coverage).
This was the fall and ruin of a beloved figure playing out on TV in a way that had never happened before. So great was the impact that Simpson’s murder trial would inspire a 2016 FX series: “The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story.” More than 20 years later, Simpson’s impact on culture remained strong.
As it did Thursday, April 11, with the announcement of his death — his life ended, but the story continues.