Back in 1995, “trial of the century” may have seemed a little over the top, even as the television-watching public was transfixed by gavel-to-gavel coverage, and hitherto obscure Los Angeles lawyers became household names. More than 20 years later, though, it sounds like an understatement. The trial of O. J. Simpson for the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald L. Goldman touched every exposed nerve in the American body politic and forced Americans to confront matters we often prefer to cloak in euphemism and denial: racial division, domestic violence, the hyperactivity of the news media and the toxicity of celebrity culture.

None of that has gone away. If anything, the contradictions exposed by the trial have been heightened. But for a long time, the killings, and Mr. Simpson’s acquittal, lingered in a familiar kind of semi-oblivion, a bizarre, horrible episode we might remember but didn’t really want to think about. For people too young to have watched the proceedings in Judge Lance A. Ito’s courtroom unfold in real time, the story had a fuzzy, almost folkloric quality. A great football player might have stabbed two people to death. A jury decided otherwise. Kardashians were somehow involved. Weird.

But this year, either by coincidence or by through the inscrutable workings of the spirit of the times, the story is being retold not once, but twice, both times with impressive clarity and seriousness. “The People v. O. J. Simpson,” Ryan Murphy’s extraordinary installment in the “American Crime Story” anthology on FX, which had its premiere in February, focused on the trial itself and on the constellation of characters brought together by the defendant. Mr. Simpson himself, though capably played by Cuba Gooding Jr., was a bit of a cipher, less the protagonist of the drama than its structuring absence. The series was pretty sure about what he did, but it never quite figured out who he was.