Race at the heart of FX miniseries The People v. O.J. Simpson, author says

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'In episode three, I'm actually a fairly important character," Jeffrey Toobin says.

Speaking about FX's monster miniseries The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story – one of the year's biggest pop-culture honey traps – the true-crime author spells out the surrealism: The long-time legal analyst was on set the day that filmmakers shot a scene in which the actor playing him (Chris Conner) has a meeting with notorious defence attorney Robert Shapiro (played by the inimitable John Travolta).

"I carry around this reporter's book with me all the time," Toobin says, noting that he promptly lent it to his alter ego.

The writer knows a thing or two about the case: His pretrial story in The New Yorker was the first to report that Simpson's lawyers planned to use the "race card," and accuse Los Angeles police detective Mark Fuhrman of planting evidence. Toobin's story later morphed into a book, 1996's The Run of His Life, on which this new 10-part TV series, hatched by Ryan Murphy, is based. Both a soapy peephole thriller and a legal composter, Toobin's account is considered the In Cold Blood of the Simpson case, one that aptly captures a saga that has been alternately called noir (though more Twin Peaks than Double Indemnity) and/or television's first reality show. (pre-Survivor, pre-Housewives, pre-everything). It was so massive that more people, in 1994, watched Simpson's now-infamous Bronco chase than that year's Super Bowl. To underline matters: Boris Yeltsin's first question when he met Bill Clinton, a year later? "Do you think O.J. did it?"

For Toobin, that's never been the question. "My book is not exactly a whodunit," he quips during an appearance in Palm Springs, Calif., as part of a recent "Book to Screen" series. "On about page three, I say: guilty, guilty, guilty," he adds, reflecting on the more than 60 pieces of physical evidence linking Simpson's home and car to the house of his murdered former wife, Nicole Brown Simpson. (Plus the lie-detector test the NFL icon had failed, plus the history of domestic violence.)

The miniseries, which boasts a stacked cast, – Cuba Gooding Jr. as O.J. Simpson! Sarah Paulson as Marcia Clark! Nathan Lane as F. Lee Bailey! Connie Britton as Faye Resnick! – takes a more oblique approach. Amazingly, as it's pointed out, the "Trial of the Century" had never been dramatized before. So, why now?

For the owlish-looking Toobin – who speaks with the intonations of the world's best oncologists, and has the requisite greying earned over the past two decades – the answer is clear. "The theme of my book, and it's certainly the theme of this miniseries, is the pervasiveness of the issue of race," he says. "Basically, the miniseries opens with a montage of the Rodney King riots [in 1992]. Then, there is a title on the screen that says, 'Two Years Later.'"

Yes, "the LAPD was terrible," he goes on, "but what makes the story so complicated, and interesting, is this: Did this real history of discrimination give the most undeserved victim in history the room to mount an acquittal? That tension is explored a great deal. And what are we talking about right now? The police, the African-American community …"

Names such as Trayvon Martin and Tamir Rice hang in that ellipsis.

In the years since Judge Ito and Kato Kaelin adorned the daily headlines, the 55-year-old Toobin has parlayed his byline into a long-running gig as CNN's legal analyst, as well as authoring a swath of other justice-elbowing books, including A Vast Conspiracy (about the Clinton impeachment hearings), Recount (an inside look at the Gore-Bush presidential ballot recount) and the coming Urban Guerrilla: The Wild, Strange Saga of Patty Hearst and the Symbionese Liberation Army (another insane media sensation of its time). But, like so many of the players and even bit players in the cirque du O.J., that original case is never far.

When Toobin heard the miniseries was going to be made, he initially thought, "You can do it sort of as a docudrama, with news footage, or alternately you could do it as camp." But Murphy did neither. "They did it as a real drama," Toobin says, "with people who are interesting, and complex."

Having said that, camp does intermittently rear its head in the series, decked out in a life-is-stranger-than-fiction floppy hat, and made tragicomic with the passage of time. Robert Kardashian, who was one of Simpson's best friends, registers as a "minor character" in Toobin's book, but looms large in the series. Back then – long before his clan had become sticky-glued to the zeitgeist – he was the guy who carried his friend's garment bag (which prosecutors later speculated may have contained bloody clothes and/or the murder weapon) after Simpson returned from Chicago on a red-eye flight following the stabbings. He was also the fella who read out loud the contents of Simpson's "suicide note" to reporters following the Bronco chase – the note in which the most famous man in the world at that second referred to himself as a "battered husband," and signed with a smiley-face written into the "O" in O.J. (True story.)

David Schwimmer plays the role of Kardashian in the miniseries, and "one of the things that the filmmakers have done is build up that part," Toobin says. "They've done a few scenes – not too many, but a few – where it's like Kim, Kourtney, Khloe, come on out. I've been at a few screenings, and this always gets big laughs." (FYI: Selma Blair plays Kardashian's ex-wife Kris Jenner, who was one of Nicole's best friends.)

Based on internal legal memos and testimony, plus interviews conducted with a swirl of private eyes, cops, neighbours, waiters, friends and forensic experts, the series pulls from a book that inevitably walked the line between the farcical and the ghoulish. There's the revelation, for instance, that when an LAPD dog trainer "interviewed" Nicole's dog – the only witness to the crime – he found the pooch to be an emotional pussycat, lacking "instincts or courage to protect his territory, owner or himself."

Incidentally, there's the "alternate reality" that Toobin often brings up when talking about the case – a reference to the dial-change that Simpson's lawyers pulled off in his defence – which also brings to mind something that makes the story more current than ever: Donald Trump. If there's anything America has learned since Mr. You're Fired lit the entire news cycle on fire, it's that "spin" is always in style: the twisting of facts to create a counternarrative, emboldened by a media that repeats it to the point of normalizing it.

My main lingering feeling from watching the first few episodes of the miniseries, meanwhile? So intense was the media mayhem around the trial at the time that everyone inside its vortex was "acting" to some extent, with the self-consciousness at such a peak that "the lawyers weren't lawyers; they were lawyers playing lawyers," as writer Lili Anolik once put it in Vanity Fair. It was the feeling of watching a movie within a movie within a movie. "The judge wasn't a judge; he was a judge playing a judge. Same with the witnesses, the experts, even the victims' loved ones … observers standing outside the drama watching themselves be characters in the drama."

The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story premieres Feb. 2 on FX.