Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Impeachment: American Crime Story’ On FX, Where The Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky Scandal Is Retold

Out of all of Ryan Murphy’s various franchises, American Crime Story has been the most consistent in quality. It’s because Murphy and partner Brad Falchuk tamp down their proclivities towards camp and painting characters with broad strokes, like they do in their other shows. It’s also because the cases they’ve examined so far in the anthology — the O.J. Simpson trial and the death of Gianni Versace — were pretty serious topics even though they have glitzy celebrity components. The third season, Impeachment, examines the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, which is serious but has the potential for the campier parts of the story to come to the fore. Will Murphy and Falchuk tamp down those instincts, and play this story straight?

IMPEACHMENT: AMERICAN CRIME STORY: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: “January, 1998. Washington D.C.” A crying Monica Lewinsky (Beanie Feldman) looks out the window of her dark apartment on a rainy day, trying to wipe away tears.

The Gist: As she packs, Lewinsky gets a call from Linda Tripp (Sarah Paulson), who tells her to meet her at the mall near the Pentagon; she may have a way of keeping her in Washington.

While Lewinsky walks through the mall, FBI agents follow her. Then, in the food court, Tripp approaches, agents in tow. Lewinsky is grabbed, brought to the attached hotel, and is seated for questioning by Mike Emmick (Colin Hanks), an investigator for independent counsel Kenneth Starr. Tripp is in the adjoining room, and Lewinsky wants her to watch the interrogation, because “I want to see what that treacherous bitch has done to me.”

We go back to July, 1993. Tripp is working in the West Wing, as an assistant to White House Counsel Bernie Nussbaum (Kevin Pollak) and one of his deputies, Vince Foster (Matthew Floyd Miller). The Whitewater controversy is raging in the still-green Clinton administration, and there are rumors that Vince is having an affair with First Lady Hillary Clinton (Edie Falco). Foster, distraught over all the rumors, exits the office, drives to a local park and shoots himself.

In the aftermath, Tripp, a 20-plus-year veteran of the West Wing, is adrift. She tells Katherine Willey (Elizabeth Reaser), a donor’s wife who has a do-nothing internship in the office, that she’ll protect herself by writing a book. But when she won’t name names during her meeting with bulldog literary agent Lucianne Goldberg (Margo Martindale), Goldberg shuts her down. Without any actual dirt, she can’t sell Tripp’s book.

In the meantime, in 1994, Paula Jones (Annaleigh Ashford) has to deal with the fallout from a magazine article detailing that she had sex with then-Arkansas governor Bill Clinton in 1991. Her husband Steve (Taran Killam) has a near-meltdown, and they consult a divorce lawyer to take their case and seek an apology from Clinton (and a role for Steve on Designing Women). After a disastrous press conference, a coterie of Republican strategists, including Ann Coulter (Cobie Smulders), gets her high-powered D.C. attorneys, who insist that she sue the president on a sexual harassment claim. They take the case after she draws a picture of Clinton’s penis from memory.

After Nussbaum resigns, Tripp is reassigned to the Pentagon’s communications office, where she sits in a cubicle farm and nitpicks every little thing; she certainly sees it as a demotion. But about two years into her tenure there, Lewinsky crosses her path. She’s been temporarily reassigned to the Pentagon from the West Wing because of a, um, sticky situation with someone she’s involved with in that office. Tripp, after having been dismissed by Goldberg for having old information, has a source of new info for the literary agent.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Impeachment: American Crime Story has the same pacing as the other two seasons of Ryan Murphy’s franchise. However, The People Vs. O.J. Simpson and The Assassination of Gianni Versace had a seriousness at their core that Impeachment somehow lacks.

Our Take: When the country was embroiled in the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal in 1998, the overarching feeling, at least among those who didn’t hate the Clinton administration, was, “Doesn’t the country have better things to do than to spend resources on this?” We get the feeling that this is what Murphy and Brad Falchuk, with lead writer Sarah Burgess, are getting at with the tone of Impeachment. We’re just not sure if that tone is the right way to tell the story.

The first episode doesn’t have a lot of nuance. While we appreciate the performance of Paulson, whose usual expressiveness is tamped down by Tripp’s put-upon personality and the now-controversial fat suit she wore to play her, Murphy and Falchuk make Tripp even more cacklingly nasty than she’s been portrayed by the news media or by John Goodman on SNL. If the idea is to show the hows and whys of Tripp befriending Lewinsky in order to betray her, the first episode still doesn’t show much about Tripp’s inner life to get us there. We know the show doesn’t necessarily want to get us on Tripp’s side, but there needs to be at least some context to Tripp’s hatred other than the fact that she’s just bitter.

We’re also not quite there with Feldstein as Lewinsky just yet. Because the show takes pains to put everyone in enough makeup to evoke people’s images of the real people in this story — Paulson in prosthetics and the fat suit to play Tripp, Clive Owen being made to look like Bill Clinton, Annaleigh Ashford with a fake nose to mimic Paula Jones’ signature feature — the fact that Feldstein looks very little like Lewinsky is a distraction. What we hope is that, with Lewinsky on board as one of the show’s producers, Feldstein’s performance will come around to resembling the intern who thought she had a real relationship with Clinton and whose life was torn apart for years by the news media, making fun of everything from her weight to her naïveté.

Ultimately, that’s the story we want to see in Impeachment: how the fact that Clinton got away with his abuse of power over Jones and Lewinsky led to him lying to Congress, and how Lewinsky — who admits to her grave mistakes in this “relationship” — undeservedly took the brunt of the media vitriol in an era that should have been more enlightened than it was. If we see more of that story in the episodes going forward, we would have a better feeling about the campy tone of it all.

Sex and Skin: Nothing in the first episode, but we know other things are coming. Let’s hope the cigar incident is shot somewhat tastefully.

Parting Shot: As Tripp calls Goldberg, Lewinsky gets a call of her own. She answers and says, “Hi, handsome.” On the other end is Bill Clinton (Clive Owen), asking her how her first day at the Pentagon was.

Sleeper Star: Annaleigh Ashford is the highlight of the episode as Paula Jones, mimicking Jones’ simultaneous hesitancy to talk about details combined with the strength she had to come forth with her accusations in the first place. And she wears Jones’ signature frizzy ‘do quite well.

Most Pilot-y Line: Nussbaum tells a very green George Stephanopoulos (George H. Xanthis) that appointing an independent counsel to investigate the Whitewater claims would spell the “death of Clinton’s presidency,” because the counsel will probe until he finds something illegal. Some not-so-subtle foreshadowing there.

Our Call: STREAM IT. We give this recommendation on the hope that Impeachment: American Crime Story dives deeper into the culture that gave Clinton a pass for the Lewinsky scandal and rained all the crap down on Lewinsky and Tripp. But if it stays with the broad strokes we saw in the first episode, this season will be a disappointment.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.

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