The Washington Post - USA (2021-11-11)

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 11 , 2021. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ RE C3

To his credit, the sup-

er-producer has ceded huge

amounts of creative control to

other writers with the “American

Crime Story” series. But Mur-

phy’s fingerprints are still all

over the show — his most presti-

gious to date — particularly in its

two-pronged approach of hu-

manization and sensationaliza-

tion. That approach worked bet-

ter with the first two seasons,

particularly because the worlds

of fashion, professional sports

and tabloid journalism lend

themselves much more readily to

operatic flights of fancy than

gray offices at the Pentagon or

even the cramped grandeur of

the White House.

In “Impeachment,” Murphy’s

love of locating the human frail-

ties and outsize desires within

larger-than-life personages is a

better fit for supporting figures

like Ann Coulter (Cobie Smul-

ders), Matt Drudge (Billy Eich-

ner), world-weary literary agent

Lucianne Goldberg (Margo Mar-

tindale) and press-hungry con-

servative activist Susan Carpen-

ter-McMillan (Judith Light) —

people who are used to playing a

version of themselves for public

consumption, or in Drudge’s case,

eager to step into such a role.

But Murphy doesn’t quite

know what to do with a naif like

Monica (cf. also see the core

characters of his wretched “Hol-

lywood”). On his “American Hor-

ror Story,” a sweet, whiny, wide-

eyed romantic like her would be

bloodily dispatched in the cold

open. Murphy has built a TV

empire by whetting our appetites

for complicated women — and in

this telling, Monica unfortunate-

ly isn’t one of them.

[email protected]

Tonya Harding biopic “I, Tonya,”

for instance, foregrounded the

domestic abuse she suffered at

the hands of her husband, whose

apparent solution to the figure-

skating rivalry between his wife

and Nancy Kerrigan was more

violence, while the Lorena Bob-

bitt docuseries “Lorena” recon-

textualized her headline-seizing

crime within years of spousal

battering and marital rape. But

“Impeachment” doesn’t deliver

much in the way of fresh informa-

tion or a newly considered point

of view, in part because the real-

life Lewinsky had already offered

up the fruits of her hindsight and

reconsidered her experiences

within #MeToo in high-profile,

widely discussed essays.

After 30 years, we’ve had

enough of the Clintons.

Hillary and especially Bill may

be the only two figures indelibly

linked to the ’90s that have evad-

ed our nostalgia for that decade.

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 mis-

steps. Despite a late-in-the-sea-

son 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 defini-

tively 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 partic-

ular memory lane.

Ryan Murphy’s very

particular set of skills isn’t

suited to this material.

rely on violent deaths to amp up

dramatic stakes — I often prefer

it, actually — but the absence of a

clear focal event in the scandal

adds to the series’s narrative dif-

fusion.

All the awful stuff that hap-

pens to Monica is more or less

legal: her affair with Bill, her

victimization by Linda, her sex-

ual humiliation by the press and

Ken Starr, even the vast right-

wing conspiracy that sought to

take down Clinton and accepted

Lewinsky as collateral damage.

But because so much of the sea-

son is framed around the friend-

ship between Monica and Linda,

as well as the parsing of legal

technicalities (“It depends on

what the meaning of the word ‘is’

is”), there’s a smallness to “Im-

peachment” that there wasn’t in

its predecessors, which tackled

larger issues of race, class and

homophobia. Lewinsky and the

women associated with Clinton’s

sexual misdeeds were certainly

victims of sexism, but for too

much of the season the show is

more interested in underscoring

Linda’s betrayal than in indicting

systemic issues.

Adding to that sense of relative

insignificance is the fact that the

national shame of adultery in the

Oval Office simply doesn’t regis-

ter after the near-daily political

scandals we lived through during

the Trump era. After an insurrec-

tion egged on by the president,

the power struggles of the ’90s

have never felt quainter.

Lewinsky already got

to rewrite her story.

Many of the recent pop-cultur-

al revisions of female tabloid

subjects of decades past have

featured a key reframing. The

Television

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11/11/21

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TV HIGHLIGHTS

Young Sheldon (CBS at 8) Missy
asks uncomfortable questions at
church.

Walker (CW at 8) Walker invites
Gale Davidson to participate in a
chili cook-off to make amends.

Station 19 (ABC at 8) Theo and Vic
hit a relationship milestone, forcing
Vic to reflect on her feelings.

Legacies ( CW at 9) Hope is
tracked down by Rebekah
Mikaelson.

Law & Order: Special Victims
Unit (NBC at 9) Carisi asks for help
on a murder investigation after a
witness shows signs of abuse.

Grey’s Anatomy ( ABC at 9) After
an explosion occurs in Seattle, the
doctors swing into action.

Ghosts ( CBS at 9) Sam is
commissioned to write an article
about Flower and her friends
holding up a bank.

B Positive (CBS at 9:30) Gina tries
to persuade Jerry to move to a
senior center after he faints.

Law & Order: Organized Crime
(NBC at 10) A bombing affects the
NYPD.

PREMIERE

Love Never Lies (Netflix) Six
couples take lie detector tests in an
attempt to win a cash prize.

SPECIALS

Hidden Heroes: The Nisei

Soldiers of WWII (History at 8)

The story of s ons of Japanese

immigrants volunteering for the

war after Pearl Harbor.

MOVIES

Tom Petty, Somewhere You Feel

Free (YouTube) A look back on Tom

Petty during the making of his 1994

album, “Wildflowers.”

LATE NIGHT

Daily Show/Noah (Comedy

Central at 11) Will Smith.

Tonight Show/Fallon (NBC at

11:34) Taylor Swift, Colin Quinn,

Sam Fender.

Late Show/Colbert ( CBS at 11:35)

Kenneth Branagh, Ellie Kemper.

Jimmy Kimmel Live (ABC at 11:35)

Benedict Cumberbatch, Kevin

Garnett.

Late Late Show/Corden (CBS at

12:37) Andrew Garfield, Jamie

Dornan, Laurie Kilmartin.

Late Night/Meyers (NBC at 12:37)

Taylor Swift, Aisling Bea, Elmo

Lovano.

— Anying Guo

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entertainment/tv

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Ragdoll (AMC Plus) Detectives must solve a gruesome mystery: six people
are murdered and their body parts are assembled into a giant body called
the “Ragdoll.” Pictured: Henry Lloyd-Hughes as DS Nathan Rose.

reputation after he admitted in

2015 that he had lied about being

attacked by enemy fire during a

helicopter ride while covering the

Iraq War. The scandal led to his

suspension and eventual depar-

ture from “NBC Nightly News”

after more than a decade as the

show’s anchor.

An NBC investigation reported-

ly found 11 instances in which

Williams had fudged details about

his reporting. Williams was re-

placed permanently by his fill-in,

Lester Holt, who still anchors

“Nightly News.”

Williams apologized to viewers

and was given a second chance as a

breaking news anchor at MSNBC,

the network he had appeared on

when it first launched in 1996.

(NBCUniversal, which is owned by

Comcast, is the parent company of

both NBC News and MSNBC.)

In her memo, Jones praised

Williams for having “great resil-

iency” in his career at the media

company, and Williams has

earned praise for his successful

comeback — albeit in a lower-

wattage role. He also helped an-

chor coverage of major political

events for the network, including

last year’s presidential election —

a sign of the company’s renewed

trust in him.

Williams said he’s as proud of

his time anchoring the 11 p.m.

hour on MSNBC as he is of his time

in the “Nightly News” chair and

asked for his viewers to remain

“loyal” to the show. His show

a ttracted an average of just under

1 million total viewers last month,

after achieving several months of

massive audience totals in the

news-heavy months following the

2020 presidential election.

“I have been truly blessed,” he

said on Tuesday. “I have been al-

lowed to spend almost half of my

life with one company. NBC is a

part of me and always will be.”

[email protected]

BY JEREMY BARR

Brian Williams, who has at-

tempted to rehabilitate his career

as a late-night host on MSNBC

after a stunning downfall as an-

chor of the highly prestigious

“Nightly News” on NBC, an-

nounced on Tuesday night that he

will leave his corporate home of 28

years at the end of this year.

Williams, 62, has hosted “The

11th Hour with Brian Williams”

since 2016. He did not give a specif-

ic reason for his impending depar-

ture, but said in a statement that

he is ready to start a new chapter in

life after his contract with the com-

pany expires next month. He did

not announce a new professional

opportunity but indicated that he

would be open to one.

“There are many things I want

to do, and I’ll pop up again some-

where,” he said. “For the next few

months, I’ll be with my family, the

people I love most and the people

who enabled my career to hap-

pen.”

Williams’s 11 p.m. show on

MSNBC has been a success, estab-

lishing itself as a home for cable

news viewers who are up late and

want to hear its famous host chat

with a bevy of prominent report-

ers and guests about the news of

the day.

“He has built a fiercely loyal

following for The 11th Hour and

we and our viewers will miss his

penetrating questions and

thoughtful commentary,” MSNBC

President Rashida Jones said in a

memo to staff on Tuesday night.

She conveyed that the decision to

depart belonged to Williams, and

that he had “informed [the net-

work] he would like to take the

coming months to spend time

with his family.”

After many years as one of the

country’s most well-known and

well-respected news anchors, Wil-

liams was forced to rebuild his

Williams announces his

departure from MSNBC

ART STREIBER/MSNBC

Brian

Williams, 62,

has hosted

“The 11th

Hour” on

MSNBC since

2016.

So what happened? Here are
some spoiler-free theories, from
the most impactful to the least.

It just wasn’t very good.

My tepid review of “Impeach-
ment” was one of many that
greeted head writer Sarah Bur-
gess’s vision when the season
premiered in early fall. Centered
on a protagonist (Monica) de-
fined by featureless innocence
and a villain (Linda) by over-the-
top grotesquerie, “Impeachment”
offered up a quantity of charac-
ters in lieu of quality of character-
ization. Burgess’s thematically re-
petitive yet unnecessarily compli-
cated scripts didn’t play to Feld-
stein’s strengths as an actor,
while Paulson’s use of a fat suit
garnered at least as much atten-
tion as her performance, which
was further obscured behind
wigs, glasses and prosthetics.

It won’t be available
to stream for nearly
another year.

While most current FX series
have found a streaming home on
Hulu (hence the eyebrow-furrow-
ing, corporate-Frankenstein
phrase “FX on Hulu”), “Impeach-
ment” isn’t one of them. Thanks to
a deal made back in 2016, the
latest season of ACS won’t make
its streaming debut for another 10
months, when it’ll pop up, confus-
ingly, on Netflix. (FX subscribers
can, of course, watch the old-fash-
ioned way or on demand now.)
FX chief John Landgraf con-
ceded earlier this year, “I don’t
remember the last time that there
was a really water-cooler show
that was scripted on a linear
cable channel,” acknowledging
that it’s hard to build buzz in 2021
for a show that’s not available to
stream — a sign of how much the
TV business has changed in just a
half-decade. “Impeachment”
might become a belated hit when
it reaches Netflix, like the first
season of “You,” but it would’ve
helped if it were more compel-
ling.

Where’s the ‘crime’?

Not to put too fine a point on it,
but the first two seasons of
“American Crime Story” revolved
around cases of murder. I’m fine
with entertainment that doesn’t

NOTEBOOK FROM C1

‘American

Crime

Story’s’

misstep

TINA THORPE/FX

Beanie Feldstein as Monica Lewinsky in the promising-on-paper-but-disappointing-on-screen

“Impeachment: American Crime Story,” which never really capitalized on her strengths as an actress.