Spoiler alert: This column contains light spoilers about the Nov. 2 episode titled “The Grand Jury.” On the penultimate episode of “Impeachment: American Crime Story,” Monica Lewinsky (…
, it has become increasingly easy for pieces of media to present themselves as telling the counterintuitive truth when, in fact, they’re saying exactly what their audience already believes. “Impeachment” embraces this tendency with gusto, framing a popular message as revisionist.
For all this, it’s impossible to deny that Lewinsky’s rescuing her own reputation after it was tarnished by a relationship in which she was the far less powerful partner was an admirable feat. And her telling her story coincided with — and likely helped to push along — a culture-wide reevaluation of sex, harassment, and assault. “Impeachment,” then, frustrates most of all in its treatment of these issues.
But consider what other angles on the story are left hanging. The show’s perspective on Tripp seems so fixed that it’s perhaps futile to bother wondering what might have been had the writers been really curious about what besides rage made her flip. Moving on, then, one wonders about the person who’s actually being tried for the crime on this “Crime Story.
This is a performance that might, in another context, have lent painful and wrenching complexity to “Impeachment,” and have raised real and difficult questions: How should society, now, deal with a former President who seems constitutionally incapable of admitting he was wrong? What does it mean for us all that he was let off the hook, and that for many years his defenders went so vociferously after Lewinsky? To pursue these lines of thought is uncomfortable, in the way the first two seasons of...