Impeachment: American Crime Story

Abstract

During the quarter century separating Watergate from Whitewater, the powers of the American presidency mushroomed while the subjects of our political energies telescoped. A latter-day Nora Desmond might pinpoint the precise moment when the pictures got small—the first time, as melodrama, the next as soap opera. Compare, for example, the big-screen political thriller All the President's Men (1976), which enraptured audiences in the year of the nation's bicentennial and garnered eight Academy Award nominations, to the limited-run cable television series Impeachment, the third and least-watched installment of the Ryan Murphy anthology series American Crime Story, whose ten uneven episodes dribbled through the bilious fall of 2021. If the ground zero of All the President's Men is the smoke-filled newsroom, landlines ringing and typewriter keys clacking, the locus classicus of Impeachment is the microwave oven, in which Linda Tripp (brilliantly played by Ryan Murphy repertory company regular Sarah Paulson) heats a desultory Lean Cuisine night after night. “Weight Watchers makes these great meals you can microwave!” Monica Lewinsky (an effortful Beanie Feldstein) tells Tripp after they meet cute, in episode one, amid a warren of cubicles at the Pentagon, whence both have been exiled from the West Wing. It's 1996, and Bill Clinton's campaign to retake the White House is in full swing. “The highlight of my day is when I warm a potato in the microwave and eat it alone in front of the Nbc news,” Tripp sighs to Lewinsky in episode two. There are few episodes in which we see neither a microwave nor a blender—shout out SlimFast!—and few conversations between Linda and Monica that don't recur to weight. That she was bullied, in grade school, as “Big Mac,” is the first drop in the mighty stream of increasingly consequential confidences with which Monica entrusts her treacherous new gal pal. Call it All the President's Women: a tale of calories, dress sizes, and the fate of a nation. The pictures got small, but the female protagonists apparently didn't shrink quite enough.