The devastating terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, were such a monumental moment in recent U.S. history that it’s tempting sometimes to divide American popular culture into “pre-9/11” and “post-9/11.” Tempting, yes — but not so easily done. Looking back, it’s surprising just how many TV shows that we tend to identify with the ‘90s actually aired a sizable chunk of their episodes after the World Trade Center towers fell. Friends, Frasier, ER, Law & Order, NYPD Blue … They all carried on the spirit of the decade in which they were born, in an era when the world behind the television screen suddenly felt very different.

That schism between the seemingly benign atmosphere of America in the ’90s and the “we can die at any moment” anxiety of the ’00s is the subject of The Looming Tower, Hulu’s miniseries adaptation of Lawrence Wright’s book about the U.S. intelligence-gathering errors — and the stealthy forces of international malevolence — that led to 9/11. The differences between the ’90s and now also serve as subtext to both series so far of American Crime Story (both the multi-Emmy-winning hit The People v. O.J. Simpson, and the more under-the-radar The Assassination of Gianni Versace), as well as Law & Order True Crime: The Menendez Murders, Manhunt: Unabomber, Unsolved: The Murders of Tupac & the Notorious B.I.G., and Waco.

During the past few years, we’ve been living through a boom-time for true-crime stories, with the podcast Serial and the TV docu-series Making a Murderer and The Jinx fueling the phenomenon. And thanks to the huge success of The People v. O.J. Simpson (and the Oscar-winning documentary O.J.: Made in America, which aired in five parts on ESPN around the same time), trend-chasing TV producers have been on the lookout for more tales of murder and scandal, drawn from an era that its target audience might remember.

There’s undeniably something cynically opportunistic about this sudden boom. It’s not like Law & Order creator Dick Wolf backed an L&O-branded miniseries about Erik and Lyle Menendez because his writing team (led by René Balcer) had something profound to say about American life in the mid-’90s. The calculation for pretty much of all of these shows has likely been something like, “Boy, people really tuned in for those O.J. things … how can we get in on that?”

But here’s what’s surprising: Pretty much all of these series have been good.

[…] The Assassination of Gianni Versace has been even bolder. To tell the story of how serial killer Andrew Cunanan (played with impressive oiliness by Glee star Darren Criss) murdered five men in four months, the show begins with him shooting the famed fashion designer Versace (Édgar Ramirez), and then moves roughly backwards in time episode by episode, amplifying the tragedy by showing Cunanan getting less desperate and more hopeful. More to the point, The Assassination of Gianni Versace very purposefully portrays the more underground nature of gay culture in the ’90s — when AIDS was more of a danger, “outing” could kill a career, and marriage was out of the question.

Why is TV so obsessed with crimes from the ’90s?