There's a theatricality and lack of nuance to the characters that is almost universal. Many, if not all, are cartoonish. Paula Jones, played by Annaleigh Ashford, is so naive and simple-minded it seems her entire character is a high-pitched voice and a Southern accent. Sarah Paulson's Linda Tripp, who plays a pivotal role in the story, is verging on satirical. However, Tripp is such a deliciously bitter and twisted limelight chaser that it's impossible not to enjoy Paulson's performance of her. Several other characters would be perfectly at home in an episode of The Young and the Restless.
Central to the narrative of Impeachment is the idea that Lewinsky and Clinton were having a consensual affair. Lewinsky clearly wants to eradicate any notion she was the victim of workplace sexual harassment or that she was a conniving slut and instead tell the story of a very young woman who fell in love with a married man and was publicly shamed for it. While the series may be attempting to correct the record on this story, it's done in such a sensational way that it's hard to believe it's any more grounded in reality than the magazine headlines of the time. Nevertheless, I'm hooked.
HE SAW
After we'd watched the show's first four episodes, I spent a large amount of time listening to Zanna offer her thoughts, which were mostly to do with the cartoonishness of the characters and her perceived miscasting of Beanie Feldstein, who I actually thought was a pretty good choice. When she finished, I considered what I might have to say. I had found the show captivating pretty much from the start, and had been trying to work through some complicated feelings about why that was, and whether that meant it was any good in spite of its obvious tendency to cheese, and related notions of elitism in assessments of quality. I weighed these issues carefully, considered all the other things going on in my life, and thought about how much of my time - both latterly and long ago - had been taken up by Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. The silence stretched on.
"Do you have anything to add?" Zanna asked.
"No," I said, and left the room.
Reflecting on it the next day, however, I discovered there was something that interested me, something I wanted to talk about, and it was that both Zanna and I had missed the point: What will interest people in the 10 hours of this series, I realised, is not the "quality" of the show, or the success of the characterisations or whatever, but the same thing that had so mesmerised the world that it was unable to talk about any other subject for most of the late-90s: the President's infidelity. I asked Zanna for her thoughts on that and she gave some abstract but not especially interesting answer about how the show is not about infidelity but about the tearing down of a lovesick young woman. I said: "But does it make you think about infidelity in the context of our relationship?"
This was a dangerous provocation and I knew it. Marriage is hard enough without making your wife consider the prospect of you operating outside the confines of your mutually agreed physical boundaries. So it was a relief when she replied, in a voice rich with contempt: "Oh, because you're a big powerful guy like the President of the United States?"
It was a beautiful moment. I laughed; she laughed; we laughed together. Because if there's one thing that unites us more than any other in this marriage, it's the shared joy we take in the understanding that I'm not up to much.
• Impeachment: American Crime Story screens on Soho at 9.30pm Wednesdays and on Sky Go for SoHo customers.
