New York: A dog’s plaintive wail. A courtroom couplet-turned-cultural catchphrase about gloves. A judge and attorneys who became media darlings and villains. A slightly bewildered house guest elevated, briefly, into a slightly bewildered celebrity. Troubling questions about race that echo still. The beginning of the Kardashian dynasty. An epic slow-motion highway chase. And, lest we forget, two people whose lives ended brutally.

And America watched – an America far different from today’s, where the ravenousness for reality television has multiplied. The spectator mentality of those jumbled days in 1994 and 1995, then novel, has since become an intrinsic part of the American fabric. Smack at the centre of the national conversation was O.J. Simpson, one of the most curious cultural figures in recent US history.

O.J. Simpson sits at his arraignment in Superior Court in Los Angeles on July 22, 1994.Credit: AP

Simpson’s death, almost exactly three decades after the killings that changed his reputation from football hero to suspect, summoned remembrances of an odd moment in time – no, let’s call it what it was, which was deeply weird – in which a smartphone-less country craned its neck towards clunky TV sets to watch a Ford Bronco inch its way along a California freeway.

“It was an incredible moment in American history,” said Wolf Blitzer, anchoring coverage on CNN of Simpson’s death. What made it so beyond tabloid culture and the fundamental news value of such a famous person accused in such brutal killings?

In an era when the internet as we know it was still being born, when “platform” was still just a place to board a train, Simpson was a unique breed of celebrity. He was truly transmedia, a harbinger of the digital age, a walking, talking crossover story for multiple audiences.

He was sports, the very pinnacle of football excellence. He was stardom, not only for his athletic prowess but for his Hertz-hawking run through airports on TV and his acting in movies such as The Naked Gun. He embodied societal questions about race, class and money long before Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman were stabbed to death on June 12, 1994.

San Francisco 49er O.J. Simpson takes to the air as Cleveland Brown’s Thom Darden makes the tackle during an NFL game on September 3, 1978.Credit: AP

Then came the saga, beginning with the killings and ending – only technically – in a Los Angeles courtroom more than a year later. When Simpson was asked to try on the glove that the assailant wore during the attack, and it did not fit, his lawyer Johnnie Cochran coined the quote, “If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit.” The most epic of American novels had nothing on this period of the mid-1990s. Americans watched. Americans talked about watching. Americans debated. Americans judged. And Americans watched some more.