American Crime Story's third season, focusing on the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, was the buzziest show of the fall and appeared "well on its way to TV juggernaut-dom," says Inkoo Kang. "Revisiting President Bill Clinton’s sex scandal from the point of view of the person arguably hurt most by it — Monica Lewinsky, who provided feedback on 'every scene in the series' — the FX drama was intended to be a conversation starter, an awards magnet, a ratings experiment and, above all else, a pop-culture event," says Kang. "It may yet become more than one of those things, but, at least on the morning after the finale, Impeachment just feels like a grand disappointment." Kang offers several theories on why Impeachment fizzled out, including that the show wasn't widely available to stream in a world where more and more people are abandoning cable TV. But the main problem with Impeachment, says Kang, was that it wasn't very good. "My tepid review of Impeachment was one of many that greeted head writer Sarah Burgess’s vision when the season premiered in early fall," says Kang. "Centered on a protagonist (Monica) defined by featureless innocence and a villain (Linda) by over-the-top grotesquerie, Impeachment offered up a quantity of characters in lieu of quality of characterization. Burgess’s thematically repetitive yet unnecessarily complicated scripts didn’t play to Feldstein’s strengths as an actor, while Paulson’s use of a fat suit garnered at least as much attention as her performance, which was further obscured behind wigs, glasses and prosthetics. Other reasons include there being no "crime" in Impeachment: American Crime Story, that Lewinsky already got to rewrite her story and, perhaps, viewers are sick of the Clintons after 30 years. "Hillary and especially Bill may be the only two figures indelibly linked to the ’90s that have evaded our nostalgia for that decade," says Kang. "We seem to know everything — or at least have made up our minds — about them at this point: their marriage, their ambitions, their compromises, their many missteps. Despite a late-in-the-season episode centered on POTUS and the first lady, “Impeachment” has nothing new to say about their storied coupling. Sure, ACS is about Monica and Linda — the women adjacent to, yet definitively not in power — but, like them, the show inevitably gets sucked into the vortex that is Clinton lore, and you’re not alone if you just wanna skip this particular memory lane."
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TOPICS: Impeachment: American Crime Story, FX, Beanie Feldstein, Bill Clinton, Brad Simpson, Hillary Clinton, Monica Lewinsky, Sarah Burgess, Sarah Paulson