The third season of “American Crime Story” will feature the Clinton impeachment and is being produced by Monica Lewinsky, the intern who had an affair with Bill Clinton in the Oval Office while he was president.
The show will air just weeks before the 2020 presidential election, Fox News reported. FX announced Tuesday that “Impeachment: An American Crime Story” would debut on September 27, 2020. Production for the show will begin in February.
Revisiting the Clinton impeachment
Network chairman John Landgraf said about the show, “People are going to be very interested in this right around the presidential election and it’s going to be a great show.”
Landgraf has received criticism for releasing the show right before the election, with some liberals worrying it might impact the election.
Airing this during the final six weeks of the 2020 election is an abysmal idea. I’m looking forward to seeing it, and I hope FX reconsiders the timing. https://t.co/flgttR5t18
— Mark Harris (@MarkHarrisNYC) August 6, 2019
“Airing this during the final six weeks of the 2020 election is an abysmal idea. I’m looking forward to seeing it, and I hope FX reconsiders the timing,” New York Magazine writer Mark Harris said on Twitter. “There is nothing that Trump would like more than to turn the homestretch of 2020 into a revisitation of the Clintons. Don’t do this, @FXNetworks. It’s a disservice to our fragile political system and to the talented people involved in this show.”
Sara Burgess will write the script based on Jeffrey Toobin’s bestselling book “A Vast Conspiracy: The Real Story of the Sex Scandal That Nearly Brought Down a President.” Beanie Feldstein (Booksmart) will play Lewinsky, and Sarah Paulson, who played prosecutor Marcia Clark in season 1, will return to play Linda Tripp, the Pentagon official who covertly recorded Lewinsky speaking about her affair and sexual relationship with then-President Bill Clinton.
Producer Ryan Murphy told Lewinsky that she should be the one to tell the story of the scandals and impeachment because it is “her” story. The first two seasons of the show secured 30 Emmy nominations and won a dozen.
The show will also feature other Clinton scandals like Paula Jones, that preceded Lewinsky.
Lewinsky tells her story
Season One of “An American Crime Story” focused on the O.J. Simpson story. It got 22 Emmy nominations and won 9. Season Two focused on Gianni Versace’s murder and won three Emmys out of nine nominations.
In explaining why she chose to produce the show, Lewinsky told Entertainment Tonight, “It wasn’t until the past few years that I’ve been able to fully reclaim my narrative; almost 20 years later.” Producing the series, she said, “allows people like me who have been historically silenced to finally reintroduce my voice to the conversation.”
Landgraf said that the series will intentionally come from a young feminist point of view rather than the news coverage of the time, which reflected the older male viewpoint of the day’s newsmakers.
“If you went back and you saw the way that that story was covered at the time, you will see that the way we perceive many aspects of it but particularly the women, the female characters that played a role in that story, has really been transformed by the ensuing history — by the period of time, by the #MeToo movement,” he concluded.
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