The series feels hot-wired with modern parallels, extending beyond the Simpson case. Illustration by Owen Freeman

“We are Kardashians,” Robert Kardashian (David Schwimmer) tells his four children, who bounce in a booth at L.A.’s ChinChin restaurant, giddy that their dad has been recognized from his appearances on cable news, sticking up for his friend O. J. Simpson. “And in this family being a good person and a loyal friend is more important than being famous. Fame is fleeting. It’s hollow. It means nothing at all without a virtuous heart.”

Is there a force more caustic, and more propulsive, than mere irony? If so, that’s the substance flowing through “American Crime Story: The People vs. O. J. Simpson,” on FX, an addictive, miraculously well-cast dramatization of the 1995 murder case, created by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, and produced by Ryan Murphy and his longtime production partner Brad Falchuk, among others. The series, like the book it’s based on—“The Run of His Life,” from 1997, by my colleague Jeffrey Toobin—is unambiguous about Simpson’s guilt in the murder of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend Ron Goldman. But this is no dutiful nineties period piece (and, yes, I know that’s a horrifying phrase, whatever your age). Instead, the series feels hot-wired with modern parallels, which extend far beyond those baby Kardashians. Without ever mentioning the links, the creators evoke the Cosby scandal and Black Lives Matter, the debate about Hillary’s “likability” and Obama’s legacy, the rise of reality TV and the expansion of cable news. It’s a tasty Proustian cronut that makes you remember the events of not only 1995 but 2015.

As one might expect of a Ryan Murphy production, particularly one done in collaboration with the writers of “Ed Wood,” “American Crime Story” is filled with dark humor, including a few camp touches. The show’s poster depicts O.J. with his hands, one wearing the notorious leather glove, over his eyes. The sixth episode is titled “Marcia Marcia Marcia.” The Beastie Boys’ “Sabotage” pounds over the Bronco chase, L.L. Cool J’s “Mama Said Knock You Out” over the not-guilty plea. Yet the series is not, in the first six episodes sent to critics, crude or cartoonish but ideologically and emotionally nuanced, with each episode providing a shift in perspective, as if turning a daisy wheel of empathy. This is in contrast with the more brutalist style of the book, which ripples with disgust at the players’ cynicism. (“Shamelessness is a moral, rather than a legal, concept,” Toobin writes, in a typical parenthetical.) In a signature move, the creators have turned Robert Kardashian, a sycophantic dope in Toobin’s telling, into a near-hero, a gloomy Sancho Panza with Christian faith. Yes, his close friend was a homicidal narcissist. But, when you commit a double murder, Kardashian (as equipped with Schwimmer’s hangdog Ross Geller gaze) is definitely the guy you’ll want by your side, baffled when you flunk the polygraph test.

Murphy and his collaborators strip the story to its elements, from the time that the bloody-footed Akita dragged a neighbor over to the corpses of Brown Simpson, who had been nearly decapitated, and Goldman, stabbed multiple times. Visually, the show is pure Los Angeles, bright and dynamic, with the cameras observing with amused theatricality the pomp of elaborate L.A. houses, their kitchen islands as big as Mustique. The series’ real strength, however, is its panoply of eccentric, and almost universally delightful, performances. The most outrageous of these is by John Travolta, as the litigator Robert Shapiro, one of the few characters who come in for a real beating. Travolta plays Shapiro as an Easter Island head of fatuousness, with Spock eyebrows and pursed lips, trailing famous names like bread crumbs. Connie Britton shoplifts scenes as Nicole’s friend Faye Resnick, drawling her first line like an aria of decadence: “She was my personal angel. I wouldn’t have gone to rehab if it weren’t for her.” As Simpson, Cuba Gooding, Jr., captures the football star’s gasbag egotism but falls short of the regal charisma that drew people to him. Less showy performers hit their mark harder, especially Steven Pasquale as a terrifyingly self-controlled Detective Mark Fuhrman, all “yes, ma’am” and bigotry behind the eyes.

Still, the heart of “American Crime Story” is its daring humanization of a trio of lawyers who were so filleted in the media that they’re now remembered primarily in satirical form, through imitations on “Seinfeld” and late-night TV: the prosecutors Marcia Clark (the one with the haircut) and Christopher Darden (who made O.J. try on the bloody glove in court), and the defense attorney Johnnie Cochran (“If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit”). On “American Horror Story,” Murphy’s other anthology series, Sarah Paulson has a diva-glam intensity, but her Marcia Clark is a more life-size figure, vulnerable beneath her matte lipstick and beauty mark. A fiery advocate for victims of domestic violence, Clark is guilty less of arrogance than of excessive purism: she’s so certain she’s got the goods on O.J. that she keeps taking the higher ground, dumping key witnesses when they make deals with tabloids and refusing to cut jurors based on race, even when her consultant warns her that black women hate her. As the case drags on, Clark’s confidence crumbles, degraded by tabloid gossip about her looks, her sex life, her divorce, and her child-custody battle. In one pungent sequence, Clark gets that famously awful haircut, then drifts past a firing squad of gawkers, like Carrie at the prom, as her face quivers with recognition that she’s become a dirty joke. She longs to be an avenging angel, but the world sees only a dowdy bitch.

Courtney B. Vance gives a layered, subtle performance as the master showman Johnnie Cochran, Clark’s most powerful antagonist—a quiet take on a bold man. My memories of Cochran are of a huckster, a preacherly clown, like “Seinfeld” ’s Jackie Chiles. In the book, Toobin portrays him as brilliant but also monstrous, a strategist who could work racial aggrievement into a plate of cookies. The show grants him more gravitas, mainly by emphasizing the complex intersection of his private and public selves. There’s a flashback to Cochran getting pulled over by the cops, with his daughters in the car, for driving in a white neighborhood. He’s as much an observer as he is a talker, standing back as the “dream team” snipes at one another like the Real Litigators of Beverly Hills. Cochran is a master of code-switching, when it comes to the media: he dismisses the Simpson case as “a loser” to a producer, then unctuously offers sympathy when the cameras blink on.

But it’s clear that, like Clark, Cochran wants justice, except from a different angle. Police brutality is not an abstraction to him; from a certain perspective, any force that hires a cop as dirty as Fuhrman has basically framed itself. Some of the best scenes take place in Cochran’s mansion, where he and his wife relax, freed from the eyes of white people, making sexy jokes and polishing his banter. “A blunders-in-blue operation,” he suggests, and then, frowning, hits on a better phrase: “Contaminated. Compromised. And corrupted!” “Oh, baby,” his wife says, laughing. “That’s it! That is it. Mmm-hmm. It has a flow, honey.” Alone among the ensemble, Cochran enjoys the greatest power of all: he knows exactly how to play himself.