The fifth episode of FX’s The People v. O.J. Simpson contains what will probably be the most talked-about scene in the whole series. No, not the glove: the redecoration.

Before a jury visits the crime scenes, Johnnie Cochran tells his client, “I don’t want you to be surprised when you see that we redecorated.” When O.J. Simpson asks why they needed to, Cochran replies, “We wanted to project the right image. Someone our jurors could admire and fully relate to.”

Looking at the original space, walls covered in photographs of O.J. and his white golf buddies and a naked picture of O.J.’s girlfriend Paula Barbieri, Cochran observes, “this won’t do at all.” The scene is so clever, and the writers are having fun with the Dream Team’s outlandish—and brilliant—strategy. As Coolio’s party jam “Fantastic Voyage” plays, the pictures of country-club golfers and nude white women are replaced with blown-up shots of Simpson’s mother and photographs of African-American children and families that Simpson doesn’t even know . . . “I like me some blackness,” Cochran says as African art and sculptures are carefully arranged; as described in Lawrence Schiller’s book American Tragedy, the defense team even hung the classic 1963 Norman Rockwell painting of Ruby Bridges walking to class escorted by Federal Marshals, The Problem We All Live With. “It’s on loan, from the Cochran collection,” the lawyer jokes. Like everything about the trial that the show understands so well, it’s absurd and all for show.

When being nicknamed the “mayor of Brentwood” (as Simpson was before the murders) is no longer advantageous, Simpson transforms himself into a model African-American citizen, at least for the jury and the cameras. Every player in the trial is acutely aware of being televised and watched. F. Lee Bailey and Robert Shapiro—no longer speaking to each other at this point in the trial—walk to the courtroom arm in arm. “Come on, Bob,” Bailey smirks, “pretend we’re at the Oscars.”

Because, when you’re not sure you can win, you have to pretend. The similarities between the trial and a football game come to the surface in this episode—victory is the only thing that matters. In a scene when Chris Darden confronts Cochran for criticizing him in the press, Cochran tells him flat out, “Brother, I ain’t trying to be respectful. I’m trying to win.”

As for the rest of the episode’s fidelity to the source material, the shocking facts are—mostly—exactly that.

Johnnie Cochran was the victim of racial profiling by the L.A.P.D.

True. But the scene did not take place exactly as depicted. According to his autobiography, A Lawyer’s Life, it was not his two daughters, but his daughter Tiffany and his son, and the scene took place in 1980, not 1982; they were on their way to a drugstore to look at toys, not the Hamburger Hamlet. Getting stopped on the way to buy toys for your kids seems even more shocking and egregious, so the change to a dinner outing seems a bit contrived. From A Lawyer’s Life: