Regardless of its lofty pedigree, Impeachment is a catastrophe: a schlocky, overheated melodrama that’s solely a level or two faraway from a Saturday Night time Reside parody. It would as nicely be a quickie TV film that aired on Fox in 1998 with a title like Intern Affairs.
With Impeachment — debuting Tuesday, Sept. 7 at 10/9c on FX; I’ve seen seven of the ten episodes — government producer Ryan Murphy and showrunner Sarah Burgess purpose to convey the identical scrutiny that ACS dropped at the O.J. Simpson trial and the homicide of Gianni Versace, this time to the Invoice Clinton/Monica Lewinsky affair and the very public fallout that led to Clinton’s historic impeachment. It’s wealthy subject material, to make certain, with loads of juicy materials to work with. However Impeachment badly fumbles it with a muddled narrative that will get overextended in all instructions, together with an unseemly tabloid edge. (The choice to dramatize Vince Foster’s suicide with an America’s Most Needed-style reenactment within the very first episode units an unsightly, exploitative tone.)
Impeachment additionally falls sufferer to Murphy’s worst storytelling instincts: shallow characterization, shock worth substituting for real shock, and dialogue that tells as a substitute of exhibiting. The characters right here say precisely how they really feel and what they’re pondering — and loudly. (“Cease worrying about Whitewater!” one White Home official yells to a different.) The entire venture has a depressing, unhealthy vitality to it, feigning gravitas with ponderous cutaways to presidential portraits and justice statues. Murphy takes a backseat to Burgess within the credit — she wrote 4 of the primary six episodes — however his fingerprints listed here are unmistakable.
The casting is an enormous misfire, too: Murphy’s productions by no means fail to draw big-name expertise, however not often have the casting selections been this ill-fitting — or this distracting. Paulson is unrecognizable right here, slathered in prosthetics, and he or she’s taking part in one of the crucial unlikable TV characters in current reminiscence. Lumbering round like an ogre, Impeachment‘s model of Linda Tripp is a vindictive gossip, a Puritanical scold and an obnoxious ladder-climber who grates on everybody round her. She nurses a particular grudge in opposition to the Clintons, however she appears to hate everybody equally… and the sensation is basically mutual. It’s not a nasty efficiency, precisely, however it’s a deeply disagreeable one, and Paulson’s facial expressions barely register beneath all of the make-up. It’s onerous to empathize together with her, and even endure her firm for very lengthy.
The actual Monica Lewinsky is a producer on Impeachment, however it’s hardly a flattering portrait of her, both. Feldstein performs her just like the dizzy heroine of a rom-com: a squeaky-voiced, lovestruck gal who can’t cease obsessing over her man. (Feldstein doesn’t look very similar to Monica, both.) The scenes together with her and Clive Owen’s Invoice Clinton are admittedly compelling, in a seedy romance novel form of method, and Owen does an honest job of capturing Invoice’s aw-shucks allure. However in the end, the scenes appear ripped from a Lifetime film, they usually’re a bit too simple on outdated Invoice, too, letting him declare to be an harmless sufferer of conservative persecution. As for his spouse Hillary, Edie Falco doesn’t communicate a single phrase as her within the first six episodes, simply serving as a smiling face within the background. (Oddly, amid all the opposite prosthetics, they didn’t even try to make her seem like Hillary in any respect.)
THE TVLINE BOTTOM LINE: FX’s American Crime Story franchise plummets with Impeachment, a trashy, exploitative trainwreck that borders on parody.