Impeachment: American Crime Story

This is a propulsive, incredibly watchable show, not really pulling the curtain back on a story you already know but turning that story into high drama, filled with fantastic performances. It may not have the nuance of “The People vs. O.J. Simpson,” but few shows do—it remains Murphy’s greatest achievement—and it stands on the top tier of 2021 dramatic programming.

Though Impeachment is not as emotionally resonant as previous ACS' previous installments, The People v. OJ Simpson and The Assassination of Gianni Versace, it's a gripping and challenging retelling of a presidential scandal — and our nation's moral failure.

Look past the rubber noses and horrible wigs and see an incisive drama about American politics, with (yet another) incredible performance from Sarah Paulson.

Look past the rubber noses and horrible wigs and see an incisive drama about American politics, with (yet another) incredible performance from Sarah Paulson.

“Impeachment” doesn’t provide a radically new context for what we know, but it compensates for that by delivering the familiar story in a detailed, strongly acted, and compulsively watchable way. It’s all tinged by the wisdom and awareness that come with hindsight, naturally, but the big draw is the dramatic retelling.

The series is rapt by [Linda Trapp's] role in this famous presidential scandal, and though its depiction of her is flawed, sometimes deeply, its detailed obsession with Tripp is nevertheless so utterly caught up in her that the show manages to leap past all the reasons why it absolutely, unequivocally, should not work. ... Impeachment is imperfect, but its excavation of this era in American history is nonetheless transfixing, and it’s not least because there is now a mythic quality to the story it tells.

Sarah Paulson's portrayal of Linda Tripp steals the show, but there's no shortage of remarkable work in a production that deserves an Emmy for its prosthetic makeup alone.

You’ll leave Impeachment feeling many things: anger at Linda Tripp, disgust toward Bill Clinton, revulsion about the cutthroat media landscape and our current team mentality of politics. But you’ll also leave it understanding that Monica Lewinsky was a real person rather than a punchline.

What we do get is something not that different from what actually happened during the impeachment scandal of 1998: a sometimes deliciously sordid tale of abuse and manipulation.

A lurid, sudsy, melodramatic and addictively watchable political noir thriller and character study.

Often funny and always captivating.

Beanie Feldstein gives a heartbreaking and revelatory performance that helps make Impeachment a riveting indictment of everyone on all sides of this, shall we say, affair. [13 - 26 Sep 2021, p.17]

“Impeachment” is not subtle but it can be entertaining. The real-world scandal, driven by gossip and people constitutionally incapable of keeping their mouths shut, was equal parts salacious, delicious, infuriating and just plain sad, which is true of “Impeachment,” too. The series thankfully allows space to be hilarious.

Yes, "Impeachment" is watchable and (yes) it's also flawed. But it's fascinating, even though you too may come to suspect, for all the wrong reasons, or one of them anyway.

There are many moments of brilliance, but they are simply not strung together with much finesse. "Impeachment" ends up as a glossy, well-acted series without much to say.

As a TV show, Impeachment is interesting enough to hold attention for an hour at a time, but as a diary of one of the biggest political scandals in history it’s slow and – much like Paulson’s Linda – too caught up in its own importance.

Though it’s not up to the level of “The People v. O.J. Simpson,” “Impeachment: American Crime Story” does gain momentum as it goes along. The cast is certainly eye-catching. ... Ultimately, though, “Impeachment: American Crime Story” raises more issues than it addresses.

Even as it centers Beanie Feldstein’s generous, humane portrayal of Lewinsky and builds to her abhorrent treatment—and a few good episodes—it keeps heading for more ambiguous waters. ... With repeated exposure to Tripp, the major beneficiary of the show’s overly long episodes, her sourness starts to seem a little hilarious, like she’s a supporting character in The Office, by way of a horror movie. Her mercilessness, her bluntness, the chip on her shoulder coalesce so that you begin to see what Monica might have seen in her.

It’s a deftly handled study of a difficult character that’s more careful and complete than the series itself which is consistently, boldly entertaining but at times a little repetitive and at other times a little structurally messy.

There are so many details. So many moving parts. So many household names in wigs and pointless prosthetics. And yet the inner lives of the key players remain elusive, as the show moves from the carpeted hallways and creamy walls of the White House to the drab, echoey offices of the Pentagon to various personal residences. The show is tawdry but absorbing.

Despite several striking performances, its perspective and ideas break out only occasionally from underneath the pancaked strata of details.

Switching back and forth in time, “Impeachment” doesn’t light often enough to give us anything really substantial. ... Paulson and Feldstein are spectacular when they’re together. But when this splits them apart, it loses its intention.

Scenes are dilated beyond their means, characters deliver exposition, and every shot and sequence announces its purpose. It’s not bad per se, but it is fairly boring, with only a handful of jokes here and there to lighten the mood. It never really sustains the tension of the kind of political drama it may aspire to be.

For a star-studded drama about an explosive historical moment, Impeachment feels oddly static. ... Impeachment goes about conveying this information by jumping back and forth across the 1990s and scattering its attention across dozens of thinly written individuals, which keeps those early episodes from building any real sense of momentum. The characters are additionally saddled with dialogue that prioritizes blunt efficiency over personality or insight.

Better appreciating America’s past abuses of power — by the president, by the media, by anyone who can benefit from punching down — is a compelling ambition, but “Impeachment” is far more beguiled by the trappings of history (the hug, the dress, the tapes) than excavating telling angles for today.

It’s a scattered, frivolous confrontation with history that neglects the more crucial parts of the Clinton impeachment. ... Even when the series does allude to larger elements within American politics, it does so with such an emphatic tone that the point itself is hard to take.

Though it goes some way towards correcting the perception that the saga was all about Lewinsky rather than Clinton it occasionally falls into the old trap of reducing the women at the heart of the drama to black and white caricatures.

At times you may question whether the other actors realize they're in the same show as Feldstein or whether that show is a drama or a dark comedy. ... "Impeachment" presents a case where the screen stars are so overwhelmed by production's devotion to excess and maximal interpretation of recent history that its key lessons are largely negated. Lewinsky, through Feldstein, may be the only one to emerge more fully acquitted in the public's perception.

Unfortunately, the wink at the original American Crime Story season only underscores all the things People v. O.J. got right that Impeachment gets wrong, by offering a shallow, Wikipedia-style synopsis of history with precious little insight into what happened, and why.

In the first few episodes, Linda’s Iago-like interventions and our knowledge of everything to come lend the production a thriller quality, a mix of drab office-cafeteria lighting and the hushed tragedy of intimacies betrayed. But Burgess keeps underscoring, to diminishing effect, the same ironies and hypocrisies. ... [Beanie Feldstein's] limitations as an actor — along with Paulson’s — are exposed by the scripts’ repetitive scenes and underdeveloped characterizations.

What is there to say about it that hasn’t been said before? That is the question with which Impeachment struggles as it reassembles all the familiar elements: the blue dress, the Drudge Report. ... A handful of interesting performances and effective episodes in the second half of the season aside, the effect is to reduce the President and his inquisitor, Ken Starr, to minor roles. If there’s a point to this exercise, it gets lost amid so many histrionic reenactments of scenes we’ve seen replayed on the news and parodied in late-night comedy for more than two decades.

Taking itself too seriously to be camp, but not seriously enough to avoid some of TV’s most obvious traps, the series struggles so hard to juggle every storyline it tackles that the scripts often force characters to be the most obvious versions of themselves.