Reality TV wasn’t that much of a reality before June 17, 1994 when O.J. Simpson’s slow-speed ride in the back of his white Ford Bronco while holding a gun to his head with his buddy Al Cowlings at the wheel transfixed 95 million people who were glued to their televisions as well as their belief that there was no way in hell their beloved Juice — a Heisman Trophy-winning and Hall of Fame running back graced with awesome acceleration and athleticism morphed into a television and movie personality oozing energy, charm, good looks and fame — could have brutally and barbarically murdered his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ron Goldman.
(Excuse me for a moment while I catch my breath after writing the longest sentence of my six-decade-old career as a columnist).
Seven months later in January 1995 the Trial of the Century began and America was never, ever the same. The trial was televised from start to finish for 10 months on every network ever invented, resulting in a blockbuster ratings bonanza until the verdict, watched by an astonishing 150 million people, was handed down on Oct. 3 of that year.
There never was a verdict awaited with such hyperventilation, anticipation and trepidation. Celebrity and crime are an intoxicating blend that folks simply cannot resist.
The verdict, of course, was acquittal as the jurors disregarded all sorts of bloody evidence linking the murders to Simpson, whose Dream Team of lawyers evidently distracted them by hammering home that black apparently was not the favorite color of every member of the Los Angeles Police Department.
The irony of his Dream Team playing the race card and putting the LAPD instead of Simpson on trial was that he largely was not seen through the lens of color. As one of his Buffalo Bills teammates once observed: “O.J.’s not Black. He’s O.J.”
Indeed, the charming Simpson was the face of a long-running Hertz Rent-A-Car television ad campaign that emphasized the speed of their service to their audience of primarily white businessmen. At the time O.J. was viewed as a pitchman who symbolized a post-racial America. Sadly as we know only too well, America is anything but post-racial.
America was split in half by the verdict, much of it along racial lines, eliciting a collective “Oh My God” from folks aghast at the verdict and a collective “Right On” from folks euphoric over it. Simpson became an instant pariah because many felt he had gotten away with murder.
Simpson, so stunned he looked like he had just swallowed a squid when he heard the shocking verdict, vowed to dedicate his life to finding the real killer.
It was a hollow promise because he confined his supposed search to only golf courses in California, Nevada and Florida. Alas, the real murderer was nowhere to be found in sand traps or deep rough — unless, of course, it was a guy by the name of O.J. holding a golf club.
He would spend the remainder of his life cast as a villain in the court of public opinion. He caught so much flak he could have walked on the lumps of shrapnel bursting around him. Publicly he held fast to his innocence as if it was a lamppost in a hurricane.
The fallout from the Simpson trial was more radioactive than anything J. Robert Oppenheimer ever concocted.
America soon became drenched in a downpour of reality TV shows that still are ballooning grotesquely. You can blame it all on O.J., who passed away recently from prostate cancer.
Simpson died without having paid the lion’s share of the $33.5 million judgment a California civil jury awarded to the families of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman after Simpson was found liable by jurors in a 1997 wrongful death lawsuit.
The fingertips of Simpson’s criminal trial legacy gave birth to such Shakespearean tragedy television nightmares as The Real World, Survivor, Keeping Up With the Kardashians (ironically the patriarch of the clan Robert Kardashian was a member of O.J.’s Dream Team), The Bachelor, The Bachelorette, Bachelor in Paradise, The Golden Bachelor, Vanderpump Rules, Selling Sunset, The Trust, Big Brother, RuPaul’s Drag Race, ad nauseum.
Then there is the whole constellation of The Real Housewives franchise of Beverly Hills, New York City, Miami, Atlanta, Salt Lake City, Potomac, Orange County, New Jersey and Dubai starring hardly-the-women-next-door who never do housework, but all have big hair, big bank accounts, big jewelry, big breasts, big mouths and big egos.
Granted, our phones and social media are prime culprits in turning American minds into tapioca. But reality TV also shoulders a large slice of the blame.
God knows what sort of justice O.J. received when he reached the Pearly Gates, but I’m sure St. Peter not only interrogated him about the murders but also about all the psychological rot he wreaked upon America by lighting the fuse on the powder keg of annihilation that is reality TV.
Mike Zielinski, a resident of Berks County, is a columnist, novelist, playwright and screenwriter.
