‘Impeachment’ creators wrestle with the Lewinsky saga

Ten-episode series views the Clinton imbroglio through the eyes of the women involved

Sarah Burgess was deep into her work as the showrunner and head writer on FX’s Impeachment: American Crime Story in Los Angeles when she experienced what she describes as “kind of a nervous breakdown.”

It happened when she started writing the episodes in which Pentagon staffer Linda Tripp (Sarah Paulson) betrays her friend, Monica Lewinsky (Beanie Feldstein), and begins recording their conversations as Lewinsky details an affair with President Bill Clinton (Clive Owen) — tapes that Tripp eventually hands over to the federal government.

Burgess had spent months thinking about Tripp’s motivations: Her devastation and rage at being transferred from the White House to a dead-end cubicle job; her insistence that she was trying to protect Lewinsky from a potentially dangerous situation with the president. When it was time for Tripp to commit the ultimate treachery, Burgess had trouble wrapping her mind around the idea. She returned home to New York so she could be alone to write.

“I refused to come back to Los Angeles. I was Googling ‘What is evil?’ and stuff like that,” Burgess said. While in retrospect it seems melodramatic, she said, “Something about it messed me up . ... I was grappling with, ‘What makes someone go this far?’ Because it’s crossing a line, doing this thing to Monica that is just unforgivable.”

Welcome to the complicated questions that define American Crime Story, producer Ryan Murphy’s franchise that reframes events and challenges preconceived notions about some of our culture’s defining controversies: a celebrity athlete charged with murders in The People v. O.J. Simpson, a fashion designer who met a violent end in The Assassination of Gianni Versace.

Now, the 10-episode third season — which debuts Tuesday — explores the events surrounding Clinton’s impeachment, through the eyes of the three women at the center of the storm: Lewinsky, Tripp and Paula Jones (Annaleigh Ashford), who sued Clinton for sexual harassment, leading to the deposition in which Clinton committed perjury.

As executive producers Brad Simpson and Nina Jacobson like to say, American Crime Story is about examining at a situation where, collectively, we’re all guilty. How, as all the horrible jokes were being made about Lewinsky, did no one speak up about the power imbalance between a 22-year-old intern and the president of the United States? Why were people so quick to laugh at and dismiss Jones? How were all three women lambasted so viciously for their appearances?

“When we were in the writers’ room, we would say, ‘You can never quite underestimate the misogyny that is still rampant, but was both rampant and not veiled 20 years ago,’ ” Jacobson said.

She hopes viewers will appreciate the show’s focus on the women whose lives were profoundly affected, and think about “What it’s like to access them as human beings instead of these one-dimensional cutouts that they ended up being reduced to?”