The scene is decidedly painful to watch; this is “comedy” only in the strictest sense of the term. There is no catharsis to be found in the discomfort here, no soft redemption in the laughter. There is only, moment by moment, awkwardness so acute as to render as indictment: of the people onscreen, in one way—all those breezy jokes about cords and cuts and killing—but also of the people on the other side of it. Those who constitute the America in question in the show’s title. The Who Is America? segment airs on Showtime not long after The People v. O.J. Simpson, Ryan Murphy’s lightly fictionalized take on the events of the 1990s, aired on FX, and after the deeply researched documentary O.J.: Made in America aired on ESPN. The upshot of both series, and of the many other retrospectives that considered the “trial of the century” two decades after its conclusion, was the cultural context the legal proceedings operated in: the obsession. The low-speed chase. The glove. The easy way Americans have of conflating murder and entertainment—the effortlessness with which American culture can take a tragedy and turn it into comedy.

This weekend, Cohen announced that Who Is America? wouldn’t return for a second season; the O.J. scene, then, doubles as the final scene to the series. And it is, in its stridently unfunny way, a fitting epilogue. Here was an exchange in which America itself, more directly than at any other point in the show, functions as Cohen’s great dupe. Each gleeful stabbing gesture made by the fake “lady-killer,” through the intimate distance of the screen, becomes a reminder of the bloodlust that helps to make American culture what it is. Each campy attempt Gio makes to trap O.J. in a confession—and each awkward laugh O.J. offers in return—is an indictment not just of the men in that Vegas suite, but of a culture that is so deeply confused about what constitutes “entertainment” in the first place.

And, so, with its finale, Who Is America? did what, in its previous episodes, it was never fully able to do: It offered a convoluted answer to the convoluted question of “Who is America?” One of the tensions that has plagued the show since its inception has been the foundational one: Who deserves to be made a mark in the first place? Who deserves to be alternately fooled and laid bare by the unsparing human spotlight that is Sacha Baron Cohen, fully committed to his character? And who, actually, is being satirized with all the trickery? (Who Is America?: What Is the Point?) The show, in its brief run, has often failed when it has come to both questions, serving largely as a testament to the limits of satire during an American moment that so efficiently satirizes itself. Its segment with The Bachelor’s Corinne Olympios, in which Cohen convinced the reality pseudo-star to promote a program that “supports” child soldiers, was a distinct case of satire that fails by punching down; its segment with the owner of an art gallery—he posed as an artist and tried to convince her to include her pubic hair in his brush—similarly confused satire with bullying.