It had a narrative sense that was second to none, an instinct for how to draw the audience’s attention that was assured to the point of flagrant, to the point of gloating, opening—bam!—with a climax, a literal cut to the chase: an S.U.V. burning rubber on the Santa Ana Freeway, the Artesia Freeway, the Harbor Freeway, and, at last, the San Diego Freeway, 20 or so squad cars in panting pursuit. Actually, at 35 miles an hour, the S.U.V. was less burning rubber than going for a spin, and the squad cars weren’t so much in panting pursuit as serene accompaniment, falling into graceful formation behind their leader, a Ford Bronco, the 1993 model, as white as innocence, as a lie. Above, in the clear blue Southern California sky, a dark cloud of news helicopters had gathered, seven in all, the pilots having followed the police transmissions on their scramblers, now very much in on the fun. The footage they shot was broadcast locally and then nationally, one network after another interrupting regularly scheduled programming to air it, NBC cutting between it and Game Five of the N.B.A. championship series, the New York Knicks versus the Houston Rockets. Lining the overpasses in certain cities and neighborhoods like Compton, Inglewood, Watts, large crowds had assembled to offer support, cheer the Bronco on, tell it to go go go, boo those deputy dogs trying to bring it down, stop its run, fuck with its mojo. The emotion of the scene was hysterical, almost lunatic—a Pro Football Hall of Famer and star of the silver screen and all-around Mr. Congeniality super-dude, now a fugitive from justice, wanted for violating, on two counts, Section 187 (a) of the California Penal Code, holding on himself a .357 Magnum, the barrel kissing his temple—yet its pacing was stately, languorous, very nearly balletic, the action hot and lurid and low-down, but the view of the action coolly detached and God’s-eye. A B-movie plot with an art-house director.

A half-hour went by, an hour. So much time, in fact, that the Channel 7 helicopter had to break to refuel, coax Channel 5 into sharing its coverage. The suspense was killing, the public watching with shock-widened eyes an American hero in the middle of a free fall. The question was, would he go splat? (Making a break for it, that was tantamount to a confession of guilt, wasn’t it? He must’ve cut to ribbons that hot blonde ex-wife of his and the hunky young waiter returning a pair of glasses her mom had left at the restaurant—yeah right, at that time of night?—and now was going to hasta la vista himself.) No, the question was, would he go splat on live television? Blow the brains clean out of his head in one long red spatter? Cover the 405 in pulp and gore and fragments of bone? Leave two of his children, already motherless, fatherless as well?

As it turned out, he would not. O. J. Simpson would, along with friend and former teammate Al “A.C.” Cowlings, reach unharmed his house on Rockingham Avenue—“the Rockingham estate,” as the talking heads were so fond of calling it—in Brentwood, where a 27-man SWAT team was waiting for him, a sniper with an AR-15 rifle hugging dirt in the kids’ playground out back. An hour later, after telephoning his mother and drinking a glass of juice, he’d be placed in an unmarked cruiser, transported downtown for mug shots and fingerprints, then given a brand-new identity: Prisoner 4013970 of the Los Angeles County jail. What would have been a story touched only by the scandal-jonesing, if-it-bleeds-it-leads tabloids—the kind of newspapers and magazines you’d line your dog’s litter box with if you had a particularly trashy, no-count dog—had become, thanks to the involvement of a man so famous he didn’t need a name, just a couple of dinky letters, front-page news for even the staidest and snootiest of publications. And the episode with the Bronco had kicked the story up another notch still. Now it was a bona fide phenomenon and national obsession. Ninety-five million Americans had tuned in to some portion of the chase. By comparison, a mere 90 million had tuned in to that year’s Super Bowl. Domino’s Pizza reported record sales for the day. (What? Experience that level of tension, vicarious or not, and you work up one humdinger of an appetite.)

The chase, which happened 20 years ago this month—June 17, 1994—happened because a woman and a man, Nicole Brown Simpson, 35, and Ronald Lyle Goldman, 25, had been brutally slain. Though nobody knew it at the time, out of that horrifying crime something new was born, or maybe “spawned” is a better word: reality TV.