Holy Guacamole:Impeachment - American Crime Story.

It was the affair that the whole world knew about it. The cigar, the stain on the dress, the blow-job, the confusion over the meaning of the word 'is', the impeachment of the President for the first time since Andrew Johnson in 1868. and, eventually, Bill Clinton's redemption in the eyes of his supporters but not his enemies.

But what of Monica Lewinsky and what of others, of which there were many, involved in the case? Impeachment:American Crime Story (BBC2/iPlayer) seeks to tell their story and it seeks to tell it in a thorough, often discursive, way. To be honest, it goes on a bit. Ten hour long episodes felt way too long and there was plenty of slack that could easily have been cut with some judicious editing.

It would have served the series well. Despite everyone involved putting in great performances, at times Impeachment dragged and, at times, I could barely muster the motivation to watch the next episode. Having invested in the series however, I lingered on but Impeachment could not, in any serious sense, be considered a binge watch.

The story it tells is well known, even if many of the details have since been forgotten or eroded by time, so I won't go into too much detail except to give a brief outline. The action begins in January 1998, just over a year into Bill Clinton's second term as US President, and with twenty-four year old Monica Lewinsky planning to move from Washington DC to a new life in New York.

That's just as well as she appears to be being followed by shadowy men in suits in the capital city. These shady characters take a clearly terrified Lewinsky (played by Beanie Feldstein) into a room full of yet more men in suits. Lewinsky's confidante Linda Tripp (Sarah Paulson), it seems, has betrayed her trust.

It is Tripp, who died in April 2020 - possibly making this drama possible, who is the pivot this version of events revolves around. We jump back to 1993 when it is Tripp herself who believes she is the wronged party. Her boss has taken his own life and she only finds out when, as usual, sitting at home alone, watching telly, and microwaving a baked potato.

Linda Tripp's dreary diet is actually one of her more endearing traits. She was, or certainly she's portrayed as being, rude, entitled, self important, and manipulative. A noisy eater too. Even when it's a baked potato. Linda Tripp doesn't seem to like anybody, and nobody seems to like her.

Except Monica Lewinsky who is, of course, unaware that Tripp is taping their phone calls (in which Lewinsky gives intimate details of her affair with Clinton) and trying to sell the stories to 'larger than life' author and literary agent Lucianne Goldberg (played with scenery chewing glee by Margo Martindale) who's got an Ayn Rand poster on her wall in case you're wondering about her personal philosophy.

Lewinsky and Tripp first met at the Pentagon when both had been exiled from the White House. Tripp permanently. Lewinsky, who openly speaks about the crush she has on Clinton (played, surprisingly well - especially in terms of his vocal delivery, by Coventry's Clive Owen), is invited back and, of course, we all know what happens next. Clinton plies her with Diet Coke, she buys him ties, and he takes her in the Oval Office.

Which isn't a euphemism. It's also, we all know, not the first time Clinton has 'strayed'. Paula Jones (Annaleigh Ashford) is living in Long Beach, California when a magazine breaks a story about a 'relationship' she had with Clinton while he was governor of Arkansas. She says that Clinton got his 'business' out in front of her and asked her to kiss it.

Later she refers to the Presidential penis as an 'area'. Jones wants an apology from Clinton and a job for her husband Steve (Taran Killam) - a man it's hard to muster much sympathy for. When Jones gives a press conference she's laughed at and asked for prurient details that she, a good Christian gal, does not want to go into - and Steve certainly would not want to hear.

While most dismiss Jones as an attention seeker, trailer trash even, Ann Coulter (Cobie Smulders) and her conservative friends think they can help her. For which read they think she can help them in their campaign against Clinton. Make no mistake, Clinton did wrong. Make no mistake, Coulter and her right wing cronies weren't out to get him because of his lack of morality but because of their own ideological beliefs and because of their own desire for power.

Coulter is joined in her pursuit of Clinton by the sort of motley crew of assorted right wingers and opportunists that would, in the decades that followed, influence and then take over the Republican party to such an extent that Trump would one day end up becoming President. Clinton's affair was wrong and his lying about it was even more wrong, lacking the dignity of his office and probably deserving of impeachment, but compare his record to that of Trump. The biggest scandal of Clinton's entire tenure would not even dent the top one thousand of Trump's four year reign.

As determined to bring down Clinton as Coulter, we're introduced to Susan Carpenter-McMillan (Judith Light) - a Conservative feminist power dresser with big hair that belongs a whole decade earlier, to old school journo Michael Isikoff (Danny Jacobs), to Matt Drudge (Billy Eichner) - an eccentric but one who at least seems to understand that the Internet will be the future when it comes to breaking news stories - or replacing them with scandal, to a young Brett Kavanaugh (Alan Starzinski), and, most of all, to the permanently angry and aggressive Kenneth Starr (Dan Bakkedahl) who would go on to compile a report in his own name of Clinton's many wrongdoings, both real and perceived.

Mostly, these people have their own personal agendas and the likes of Lewinsky and Jones are used as tools, or pawns, in a game they barely understand. Carpenter-McMillan is kind to Jones to her face but calls her "dumb as a rock" behind her back but because characters like Carpenter-McMillan and Coulter, as well as Paula and Steve Jones, are painted in such broad strokes the series loses both nuance and credibility.

It's pretty schlocky in places and, often, it luxuriates in and celebrates the very prurience it pretends to be satirising. Impeachment is good at showing how scary it all must have been at the time, specifically for Lewinsky herself, and how people like her and Jones are at the mercy of a structural patriarchy. The unnecessarily large team of four directors (Ryan Murphy, Michael Uppendahl, Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre, and Rachel Morrison) and four writers (Sarah Burgess, Flora Birnbaum, Halley Feiffer, and Daniel Pearle) do a good job of excoriating a world where high ranking men slap young women's bottoms, have affairs with them, and then throw them to a pack of press dogs while continuing upwards in their career with barely a scratch to their reputation but it would have been better if that had been done in a more emotionally engaging way.

It's interesting but the way the story was played out was so prolonged that it felt draining rather than exciting. That's probably how it felt in real life but maybe not best for a ten hour drama. One can enjoy the retro computers, phones, Rolodex file devices, ready meals, and power dressing (as well as a soundtrack that features Snoop Dogg, Mark Morrison's Return of the Mack, Jose Feliciano's Feliz Navidad, and that schmaltzy duet between Natalie Cole and her dead dad) and one can marvel at the nice overhead shots of DC that take in the Capitol Building, the Pentagon, and the White House while simultaneously being angered at a world where men in power abuse that power freely and with no serious consequences.

It's notable that Clinton's wife Hillary (Edie Falco) is sidelined until about halfway through the series and is then played as some kind of ballbreaker - as if sanity would expect anything else of a woman wronged on such an epic scale. Exterior shots of the Watergate complex neatly tie Impeachment to an earlier American political scandal but, for me, the more prescient political statement that Impeachment makes is the one about the then future, the now now.

Placards about jailing and impeaching Clinton double down on conspiracy theories in some kind of precursor to the batshit world of QAnon that nearly one in ten Americans believe in today and Coulter tells a Vietnam veteran with no legs he's the reason America lost the war (reminiscent of Trump's disgusting attacks on John McCain). Most tellingly of all, one tirade by Coulter suggests that letting Clinton get away with lying would open the door of the White House to all manner of liars and con men.

She was right about that. Not only that, she held that door wide open as Donald Trump walked in. Possibly the reason Impeachment didn't work as well as it might have done is that real life, right now, is far weirder, far more corrupt, and far more dangerous than it was in the now seemingly innocent nineties. How can you make a drama about a man getting his dick sucked at work by a young woman in a world that's just survived four years of a President that boasted about grabbing women by the pussy.

The one thing that remains the same is that the young women who fall prey to these men's impulses are portrayed not as victims, often not as humans, but as stalkers, attention seekers, and fantasists. Beanie Feldstein excellently plays Monica Lewinsky as a young woman caught in a world of obsession, angst, unrequited love, and despair punctuated with occasional moments of ecstasy when the object of her affection deigns to acknowledge her existence.

She's so innocent the first time she sees Bill Clinton's semen stain on her dress she assumes she must have spilled some guacamole on it. Which raises the question of Clinton ejaculating green lizard spunk. 

More seriously though, Lewinsky's situation is not an uncommon one for young women, and young men, all around the world and all through time. The only difference was she made the mistake of falling for the President of the United States of America. His weakness in giving in to his impulses should have been a warning to all future holders of that office. If you think it was, maybe you should check a Wikipedia page titled 'Donald Trump sexual misconduct allegations' and ask yourself why so many of those who were angered about Clinton's behaviour were so happy to not only forgive Trump but to celebrate him.