Did the president commit a crime? That’s the question that, on some level, most of the characters on Impeachment: American Crime Story are trying to answer, swept up in the scandal and media chaos that led to Bill Clinton’s impeachment. But, as it has been for every installment in the American Crime Story franchise, the actual crime may be something much less invisible— and something for which everybody watching, on some level, is culpable.
“We want the audience to feel indicted in what happened,” says series executive producer Brad Simpson on this week’s Still Watching podcast. “We always feel like the crime itself, on some bigger level, is a crime that we as America committed.” With the series nearing its end, the Clinton scandal has exploded into the public eye; in the latest episode, titled “Stand by Your Man,” Monica Lewinsky is left hiding out during immunity negotiations with Ken Starr’s team, while the Clintons are so surrounded by photographers, even while vacationing on Martha’s Vineyard, that Hillary can’t go out and take a walk. The episode is tightly focused on the relationship between the Clintons, but the prying eyes of the nation are never far from anyone’s mind.
Listen to this week’s Still Watching, in which Katey Rich and Richard Lawson discuss the episode and the complicated figure that is Hillary Clinton, and read a condensed transcript of the Brad Simpson interview below. You can subscribe to Still Watching on Apple Podcasts, and now you can also text with us at Subtext—we’d love to hear from you.
Still Watching: So you talk about how you wanted to use the lens of the women in this story. And for six episodes, more or less, we’ve had Edie Falco as Hillary Clinton kind of in the background. In episode seven she emerges for the first time, but this feels like it’s really the Hillary episode. Why did it make sense to wait so long?
Brad Simpson: We had a philosophy for the season, which is we’re going to meet each character at the point of crisis. And we’re going to meet each character at the moment at which the case really starts for them. So for Linda, it starts when her boss [dies by] suicide, and she gets kicked out of the White House. For Monica, we decided not even to start with the affair, but the moment of her being exiled to the Pentagon. For Paula Jones, we started with her seeing her name in the American Spectator magazine. And we meet Ken Starr when Linda Tripp’s name is going to suddenly come before him. And we really decided, with Hillary, we wanted to tell her story as it related to Bill’s scandal. And we really wanted to meet her the same way we’re meeting other characters, as the scandal intersected with them. And there have been some complaints online that I’ve seen that we have this great actress and we’re not using her. I hope that when people see this episode, they can see why we needed to cast somebody who has the—not just the wattage of Hillary Clinton, but also the ability to go head-to-head with an actor like Clive [Owen].
Edie Falco was really clear when she spoke to Richard Lawson that she was imagining a version of Hillary Clinton. Is that what you guys were doing too in the process of creating the story?
Hillary was probably one of the more perplexing and puzzling characters to write for our writers rooms and to discuss, because the thing about her public image is true about what is known about her, which is there’s a sort of wall, a protective wall she’s put up around herself. And if you maybe can compare Hillary’s autobiography and Bill’s autobiography, his biography is full of him doing self-psychoanalysis of his alcoholic stepfather, who beat his mother, and what it meant to grow up in Hot Springs, Arkansas. And Hillary’s is very Midwestern, very Methodist, very reserved, even the way that she described the scandal. She would say things like, “I was really disappointed in Bill,” and you can’t really get to the inner life.
There were a couple places that we could go to. There was a lot of contemporaneous reporting and there was also these papers that Diane Blair, who was her good friend, had left the University of Arkansas. She actually is the place where most of what we know about how Hillary felt about the scandal and the affair comes from.
What she has said the whole time was that she didn’t know about Gennifer Flowers, and she believed him when he told her that nothing happened with Monica. And then the really deep hurt that she feels when he comes clean. Did you guys ever talk about going a different way with that, with maybe suggesting that she knew more than she did? Or was it really just kind of taking her at her word that she was stunned?
We had to make a decision for the show about what Hillary knew or let herself know. And it seems pretty clear that she believed him, especially initially, about Monica—that he convinced her that this was a young woman who had made this all up. And I think this was wrapped up in the fact that Ken Starr was the vessel that this was coming through, because she had so much anger and hatred towards Ken Starr. And they believe that they had twisted Jim McDougal against them. They believe he’d unfairly gotten friends to testify against them, that he had gotten people to lie. And so I think it was a lie that, whether she chose to believe it or just believed it outright, that she did believe. Hillary says something in one of these episodes, which is, Bill has always been truthful to her.
I want to ask you a really broad listener question that we got a while ago: What is the crime? The franchise is called American Crime Story. There are obviously a lot of accusations of crimes like perjury. But did you guys talk about this? What is the crime at the center of the story?
We always feel like the crime itself, on some bigger level, is a crime that we as America committed. That’s less of a, you know, specific murder or a specific whatever, but it’s something we all participated in together. So in [The People v. O.J. Simpson], it was the way that we demonized Marcia Clark and Chris Darden and Johnnie Cochran. In [The Assassination of Gianni Versace], we’re talking about gay male sexual identity in the 1990s and the Defense of Marriage Act. And in this one we’re really talking about the ways in which we all engaged in this public shaming and we all indulged in making fun of and laughing at these women. But the specific crime—I mean, an impeachment is a high crime and a misdemeanor. This is a show about the events leading up to an impeachment, and certainly the right wing thinks that Bill Clinton committed a crime.
It’s interesting that people are asking that question because I guess it’s self-evident to me in a way that maybe it’s not to everybody else. But I think the real thing we constantly tried to go for is that we want the audience to feel indicted in what happened. And I like to think it’d be somewhat different today, but I can’t tell you that it would be totally different.
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