“Impeachment” Puts Monica Lewinsky Front And Center

The streaming era has seen an explosion of content devoted to revisiting, and collectively reliving, sensational scandals that became national news events, from the O J. Simpson trial to the Menendez brothers.

The best of these productions, like HBO’s recent Allen v. Farrow, raise questions about the biases of the justice system and the media regarding the workings of power and gender. They also provide more nuanced portraits of the protagonists, especially women who became tabloid caricatures — routinely slut-shamed or framed as scorned lovers or femmes fatales.

The Clinton era would seem perfect for this kind of reconsideration as well. When Bill Clinton was impeached for perjury in 1998 after lying under oath about his affair with his intern Monica Lewinsky, it became a sensational soap opera that everyone remembers, at least in outline. Images and soundbites were etched into cultural memory, from prosecutor Ken Starr’s bespectacled zealotry to Bill Clinton’s smarmy-angry denunciation of “that woman” to headlines about “the dress” that defined Lewinsky and the misogynist jokes and coverage of her life.

Throughout it all, Lewinsky wasn’t allowed to speak due to her immunity agreement with prosecutors. But when her gag order was finally lifted, she started reclaiming her image and narrative, first with a 1999 Barbara Walters sitdown and a memoir, Monica’s Story, then with an HBO special in 2002. In the aughts, she framed herself as a survivor of public shaming in a popular TED Talk, and following the advent of #MeToo, she wrote op-eds and spoke out on Twitter about the lopsided way the scandal had been covered and remembered — down to the fact that the events were often referred to as the Lewinsky scandal rather than centering the president’s misconduct.

FX’s new limited series Impeachment: American Crime Story focuses largely on reframing Lewinsky’s story and revisits the impeachment mostly from her perspective. (Lewinsky is a producer on the show.) It also includes the stories of Linda Tripp, the fellow Pentagon employee and Lewinsky confidante who recorded their conversations, and Paul Jones, another of the president’s accusers. It tries to reframe the case as a story not about sex, cigars, and betrayal but about changing media mores and abuse of power.

But in the seven episodes made available to critics, Impeachment doesn’t really provide any more insight than existing documentaries, like A&E’s 2018 The Clinton Affair — which also included Lewinsky’s participation — have already done. The series tries to build on existing critiques of how the events played out, but its analysis mostly falls flat. Like other recent scripted attempts at capturing significant political moments through detailed portraits of women, like Mrs. America and Bombshell, it feeds into ready-made narratives about partisanship and misses the opportunity to add nuance to pop cultural understandings of gender and power.

Ryan Murphy’s relitigation of national scandals often tends toward simplistic narratives. The People v. O. J. Simpson: American Crime Story might as well have been titled The Maligning of…