Simpson’s flight from police in a white Ford Bronco in June 1994 set the stage. An estimated 95 million viewers watched the SUV lead a slow-moving, two-hour, police chase on Southern California’s iconic freeways. People even staked out overpasses alongside the chase route, and cheered Simpson on with signs.

This was a glimpse into the mind-set of the American folks: present them one thing virtually too absurd to be believed — the Bronco used a flip sign at one level when exiting off the freeway — and they’d watch. Producers and Hollywood executives have been paying consideration.

“That was, in many ways, the beginning of many things on TV,” mentioned Mary Murphy, a longtime leisure journalist who labored in Los Angeles when Simpson was charged and in the end acquitted of the homicide of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her buddy, Ron Goldman. When Simpson died on April 10 at age 76, Murphy was inundated with texts — three a long time later, the phenomenon of the trial and its ripple results nonetheless loom giant within the leisure business.

Viewers tuned in en masse to Court TV to look at greater than eight months of proceedings in O.J. Simpson’s 1995 homicide trial, bolstering the tradition’s urge for food for true crime. The 24/7 cable information cycle grew to become a everlasting fixture. But the spectacle additionally helped form one other rising style, actuality TV. (MTV’s “The Real World,” one of many first well-liked actuality reveals, debuted just a few years earlier than the trial.)

No must pay legions of actors, writers and producers to dream up outlandish eventualities. Just stick some cameras in a courtroom as viewers change into remarkably invested in folks that they had by no means heard of earlier than, akin to Kato Kaelin, the aspiring actor who was staying on Simpson’s property on the time of the murders, and have become an in a single day sensation when he took the stand.

“You were absolutely absorbed in their personalities. Kato Kaelin was some guy who lived in a guesthouse and suddenly became a star,” mentioned Murphy, an affiliate professor on the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. “It was riveting — you knew every player, you knew every lawyer.”

Susan Lee, then an NBC govt overseeing daytime tv, instructed the Los Angeles Times in 1995 that the trial was “one of the best soap operas ever seen on television” — and that precise cleaning soap ratings took an enormous dive whereas it was on. “Suddenly people had the opportunity to see a real-live soap opera that had all the hooks and teasers and things you couldn’t believe happening every day.”

“It was kind of a new way of being famous,” mentioned Brian Graden, who oversaw applications akin to “Cops” and “America’s Most Wanted” as a Fox senior vice chairman of growth on the time of the trial. Later, when he labored as an govt at MTV throughout the success of “The Real World” and different actuality programming, he remembered a scholar throughout a spotlight group ask one thing like, “Why would I watch people pretend to be something if I could watch people who are the real thing?”

No one may have predicted the grip the trial was going to have on the American psyche, however in some methods, TV was prepared for this second. Michael Socolow was working the breaking information desk at CNN’s Los Angeles bureau for less than three months when the Bronco chase occurred, however he recalled that native tv stations in California had already “found a winning ratings recipe in following car chases live from above.”

As the story unfolded, the tabloids invested closely in attempting to get each twist and switch, typically leaving mainstream information within the mud. “There was unimaginable pressure on everybody in Los Angeles working for every news organization to get scoops,” mentioned Socolow, who’s now a media historical past professor on the University of Maine.

Shows like Geraldo Rivera’s new CNBC program “Rivera Tonight” devoted each evening to the trial. Other reveals like “Hard Copy,” “A Current Affair” and “Entertainment Tonight” feasted on the curiosity it generated.

But the trial itself additionally differed from earlier iterations of actuality tv. “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,” mentioned Socolow. The courtroom primarily produced the present, piped by way of a field outdoors the courthouse to whichever stations needed the feed. “I don’t think people realized how cheap the O.J. Simpson production was,” Socolow mentioned.

The trial additionally had “a narrative arc that was building to a climax,” he mentioned, combining a number of well-liked tv codecs — sports activities, sport present, thriller — 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 Kaelin, whose surfer hair and laid-back L.A. way of life virtually served as comedian reduction throughout the trial, inspiring SNL spoofs. He would spend a few years afterward showing on actuality reveals, from “Celebrity Boot Camp” to “Celebrity Big Brother.” Another sudden star was Faye Resnick, Brown’s buddy, who later confirmed up on “Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.”

The trial’s affect was even larger on a household that will change into nearly synonymous with actuality TV within the a long time to come back.

“The Kardashians emerged thanks to the name recognition from that trial,” mentioned Robert Thompson, a tv and well-liked tradition professor at Syracuse University’s Newhouse School. The late Robert Kardashian, Simpson’s shut buddy and one among his protection attorneys, grew to become a family identify. That was sufficient to offer a lift to his ex-wife, Kris Jenner and her many kids after they have been tapped as E!’s latest stars on “Keeping Up with the Kardashians” in 2007 — which not solely made the household superstars, however ushered in numerous spin-offs and copycat sequence about wacky households.

The domino impact would play out for the following twenty years, and never simply because Kim Kardashian grew to become the prototype of changing actuality TV fame into varied companies — from vogue and wonder to video games — and turned Kylie Jenner right into a billionaire beauty baron. Networks like Bravo and TLC spawned subcultures of obsessives. Competition reveals spurred careers of Grammy and Academy Award winners. And a sure host of “The Apprentice” used his present to rehabilitate his picture from tabloid has-been into savvy businessman, which he then leveraged right into a profitable run for the White House.

Thompson doesn’t suppose the Simpson trial must be given too a lot credit score for the explosion of actuality TV. “The Real World” had already been on MTV for just a few years by then. “Cops” had been on Fox because the Nineteen Eighties and Court TV had one other huge rankings hit, the trial of the Menendez Brothers in 1993. And the style didn’t actually explode till years after the trial, with early-2000s hits like “Big Brother” and “Survivor.”

But the trial “trained all these newsgathering institutions, from Court TV to the networks, on how they could have a single story become an entire business model during the life span of that single story,” Thompson mentioned. It additionally grew to become the final word content material generator, giving Jay Leno’s “Tonight Show” and different late-night comedy applications materials for months.

“If we want to call that reality TV, then certainly the O.J. Simpson trial was a master class taught by the media themselves, of how to build up interest and equity in a single story, and then use it across the board,” he mentioned.