I’m not watching that whatever that’s taking place in Washington right now. I’ve got Hidalgo playing silently on HBO, just in case that Internet rumor that ratings depend on the percentage of TV sets tuned to a certain thing turns out to be true. (Is it weird that I literally work in television and I have no idea if that is real or not?) The desultory images coming through on Twitter—Michelle Obama threw her hair up in a ponytail, the Mall has about 30 people milling through it who seem to have gotten lost on their way to a gun show—seem to prove that it truly is mourning in America.
And then there’s Hillary Clinton, descending grimly from her car in a pristine white pantsuit, a promise of what might have been to a country that seems to have eschewed baseball for the more immediate national pastime of humiliating her.
Which is probably why superproducer Ryan Murphy announced yesterday that a future installment of his blockbuster anthology series American Crime Story, which last season memorably portrayed the O.J. Simpson trial, will deal with the Monica Lewinsky scandal that led to President Clinton’s impeachment.
Look. I’m basically a Monica Lewinsky scholar. She’s a fascinating character, due for a thoughtful, revisionist, feminist analysis (much like the one Murphy accomplished with Sarah Paulson in Marcia Clark). A sympathetic portrayal of the extraordinary Hillary Clinton—a woman of unparalleled intellect and achievement, forced into a role she did not choose and a slate of terrible decisions that she would be pilloried for no matter her actions—would also not be amiss. And it’s already fun to imagine the stunt casting—could Travolta be persuaded to reprise his Clinton-like portrayal from Primary Colors? Would we want him to? Can John Goodman come back to play Linda Tripp as convincingly as he did on Saturday Night Live at the time?
Yet given the present moment, as we’ve just watched the presidency of our country pass into the tiny hands of an admitted sexual predator who is undoubtedly the least fit and most unprepared man ever to take the oath of office (and this is the kindest description of him I can possibly muster at the moment), is this really in—how shall I put this—the best of taste? Wouldn’t, say, a look at the House of Un-American Activities Committee be more apropos, or maybe Watergate, or what about the internment of American citizens of Japanese descent during World War II? Haven’t we all had enough of the tiny, and non-criminal perfidies of the Clintons dragged before us as though they are somehow reason enough to give a bigoted maniac the nuclear football?
But hey, there’s a reason Ryan Murphy gets the big bucks. Maybe he knows something we don’t. Maybe, by the time this season airs (if television still exists in its current form, and if we’re all still alive to watch it), Trump will have been impeached, he and the rest of his cabinet convicted of treason, and a special amendment to the Constitution will have been passed in order to allow the overwhelming winner of the popular vote to be out of retirement to serve as President, as should have always been her destiny. In that alternate history, Monicagate could be seen as a foundational event in bending the long arc of the moral universe towards justice.
But yeah, whatever. Tell it to the Man in the High Castle.
Rachel Shukert is the author of the memoirs Have You No Shame? and Everything Is Going To Be Great,and the novel Starstruck. She is the creator of the Netflix show The Baby-Sitters Club, and a writer on such series as GLOW and Supergirl. Her Twitter feed is @rachelshukert.
