Impeachment: American Crime Story review – addictive Monica and Bill drama
There’s a wearily informed unease with which one approaches something as precarious as Impeachment, the latest in Ryan Murphy’s glossy American Crime Story franchise, exhaustive re-enactments of stories best known by the tabloid headlines that accompanied them. The broader, supposedly serious-minded retelling of recent history, on the small and big screen, has quickly turned into SNL skit-level parody, the distracting novelty of seeing a big-name actor do an impression too often overwhelming anything more interestingly exploratory. The notoriously misunderstood or misremembered hows and whys of what really happened are drowned out by prosthetics and outsized mimicry, like you’re headed to the library but end up in the circus. It was one of the many reasons why Vice and Bombshell both failed to ignite for me in recent years, Oscarbait pantomime ineffectively gussied up as something more vital.
With Impeachment, Murphy and his team return to a time that’s served them well: the mid-90s, an era that hits a sweet spot for his older millennial fanbase. It’s where they followed the trial of OJ in the first, and best, season and then the exploits of Gianni Versace’s killer in the slightly less cohesive second. This time, there’s no killer to find or prosecute but rather a strange, messy web of sex, corruption, ambition and misogyny to untangle. We zoom in on the story of how Monica Lewinsky went from White House intern to household name to punchline, an ugly chapter that preceded chapters of similar related ugliness. While the specifics of the story and how it went from illicit affair to public obsession might be well remembered by many Americans of a certain age, for the majority of us, it’s something we recall mostly through moments – the dress, the hug, the “I did not have…” speech. This sprawling 10-episode dramatisation aims at filling in all of the gaps while also weaving a throughline that takes us to where we are now and where we’ve been since the emergence of Trump and a more pronounced US divide.
It’s a hefty task for a narrative series, one that aims to entertain rather than exhaust with information and in the seven episodes made available to critics, it’s one that’s acquitted slickly, if imperfectly, a compulsively watchable drama that avoids certain potholes while speeding straight into others. Ambitious White House intern Monica (Beanie Feldstein) sees her crush on the president, Bill Clinton (Clive Owen), turn into a secret affair but rather than view it directly through her eyes, the series centres her notorious confidante Linda Tripp (Sarah Paulson), a coworker aggrieved at the government for not affording her the power and responsibility she believed she was deserved. It’s a smart idea as Tripp is undeniably the most fascinating character in the expanding scandal and in turn, Paulson also gives the most fascinating performance but one that’s already proving to be divisive, a debate that will surely rumble on over the coming weeks.
Paulson herself has already stepped out before the premiere of the first episode to admit regret over wearing a fat suit for the role, an ingeniously forward-thinking PR move, if one that’s arrived a little too soon after production to really seem entirely genuine, given that Paulson herself was also a producer on the show. I’d argue that use of the fat suit is countered by some sensitive writing, characterisation that’s all too aware of the grotesque ways in which the weight of both Tripp and Lewinsky was lampooned at the time (a staggeringly foul SNL skit featuring John Goodman is replayed in a crushing scene late in the series). Tripp is a knotty, frequently enraging figure and a never-better Paulson works hard to not smooth out her jagged edges while avoiding turning her into a one-note villain. It’s a richly deserved reward in the increasingly deranged Murphyverse for the actor, a brief respite from her thankless procession of hokey B-movie roles playing witches or goblins or witch goblins or whatever. It’s so much more intricately developed than the collection of studied tics it could have been and as we step out to see the bigger picture, a fuller tragic view of someone who had previously been dismissed as a joke emerges.
It’s a deftly handled study of a difficult character that’s more careful and complete than the series itself which is consistently, boldly entertaining but at times a little repetitive and at other times a little structurally messy. There’s often an assumptive quality to the storytelling, at least in the initial episodes, as if we know the full story and so the writers afford themselves some confusing shortcuts while later episodes blend into one another, beats recycled.
Paulson dominates but there are also other fine performances around the edges, including a disarming Annaleigh Ashford as Clinton accuser Paula Jones and a surprisingly note-perfect Cobie Smulders as a vicious Ann Coulter. Their casting sidesteps the aforementioned SNL-ness of watching something like Impeachment, the majority of performers picked as actors rather than stars, disappearing rather than showboating. Owen’s Clinton is initially jarring but he settles into the role with ease while Feldstein is a solid Lewinsky, especially excelling in a grim episode devoted to the horror of her vile treatment at the hands of the media. But their scenes crumble in comparison to those involving Paulson’s Tripp, not bad exactly but just a little beige.
There’s at times a little bit too much for the show to take on, especially one that tends to repeat itself, and it works best when the focus remains tight on Tripp, whose bizarre travails grip even when the show around her slips. The biggest crime of American Crime Story’s third season is ultimately committed by Paulson, stealing every bit of our attention away from Bill and Monica.
Impeachment: American Crime Story begins on FX on 7 September in the US with a UK date to be announced
subjugation. These are not always separate groups or identities, but overlapping and interconnected forms of subjugation that oppose racism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia but also capitalism and its destructions, including the destruction of the Earth and indigenous ways of life.
Theorists such as Asad Haider have adopted your theory to address racial divides in the United States. Haider emphasises your view of identity formation as restless and always uprooted. But don’t the right wing usually score victories by pushing a much more fixed vision of identity?
The right is seeking desperately to reclaim forms of identity that have been rightly challenged. At the same time, they tend to reduce movements for racial justice as “identity” politics, or to caricature movements for sexual freedom or against sexual violence as concerned only with “identity”. In fact, these movements are primarily concerned with redefining what justice, equality and freedom can and should mean. In this way, they are essential to any radical democratic movement, so we should reject those caricatures.
So what does that mean for the left? If we base our viewpoints only on particular identities, I am not sure we can grasp the complexity of our social and economic worlds or build the kind of analysis or alliance needed to realise ideals of radical justice, equality and freedom. At the same time, marking identity is a way of making clear how coalitions must change to be more responsive to interlinked oppressions.
Today we often hear about the importance of listening to those with a ‘lived experience’ of oppression. Political philosopher Olúfémi O Táíwò has warned that noble intentions to ‘decentre’ privileged perspectives can easily backfire.
Yes, it is important to acknowledge that, whilea white person cannot claim to represent Black experience, that is no reason for white people to be paralyzed on matters on race, refusing to intervene at all. No one needs to represent all Black experience in order to track, expose and oppose systemic racism – and to call upon others to do the same.
If white people become exclusively preoccupied with our own privilege, we risk becoming self-absorbed. We definitely don’t need more white people making everything about themselves: that just re-centralizes whiteness and refuses to do the work of anti-racism.
How has your own gender identity informed your political theory?
My sense is that my “gender identity” – whatever that is – was delivered to me first by my family as well as a variety of school and medical authorities. It was with some difficulty that I found a way of occupying the language used to define and defeat me.
I still rather think that pronouns come to me from others, which I find interesting, since I receive an array of them – so I am always somewhat surprised and impressed when people decide their own pronouns or even when they ask me what pronouns I prefer. I don’t have an easy answer, though I am enjoying the world of “they”. When I wrote Gender Trouble, there was no category for “nonbinary” – but now I don’t see how I cannot be in that category.
You have often been the target of protesters across the world. In 2014, anti-gay marriage protesters in France marched on the streets denouncing ‘théorie du genre’ – gender theory. In 2017, you were burnt in effigy by evangelical Christian protesters in Brazil chanting ‘take your ideology to hell’. What do you make of that?
The anti-gender ideology movement, a global movement,insists that sex is biological and real, or that sex is divinely ordained, and that gender is a destructive fiction, taking down both “man” and “civilization” and “God”. Antigender politics have been bolstered by the Vatican and the more conservative evangelical and apostolic churches on several continents, but also by neoliberals in France and elsewhere who need the normative family to absorb the decimation of social welfare.
This movement is at once anti-feminist, homophobic and transphobic, opposing both reproductive freedom and trans rights. It seeks to censor gender studies programs, to take gender out of public education – a topic so important for young people to discuss. And to reverse major legal and legislative successes for sexual freedom, gender equality and laws against gender discrimination and sexual violence.
You’ve always stressed that your gender theory is not only informed by scholarly debate but also your own years participating in lesbian and gay communities. Since the early 1990s you’ve become a uniquely influential thinker within these circles. How much has changed since you came out?
Oh, I never came out. I was outed by my parents at the age of 14. So, I’ve been identified variously as butch, queer, trans* for over 50 years.
I was certainly affected by the gay and lesbian bars I frequented too often in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and I was concerned then as well with the challenges faced by bisexuals to gain acceptance. I met with intersex groups to understand their struggle with the medical establishment and eventually came to think more carefully about the difference between drag, transgender and gender in general. I’ve always been involved in non-academic activist groups, and that is an ongoing part of my life.
What kind of issues were being addressed by radical gay and lesbian politics before the word ‘queer’ emerged?
The demonstrations in my youth were certainly about the right to come out, the struggle against discrimination and pathologization and violence, both domestic and public. We fought against psychiatric pathologization and its carceral consequences. But also we fought for a collective right to live one’s body in public without fear of violence, the right to grieve openly over lives and loves that were lost. And this struggle took a very dramatic shape once HIV arrived and Act Up emerged.
Queer was, for me, never an identity, but a way of affiliating with the fight against homophobia. It began as a movement opposed to the policing of identity – opposing the police, in fact.
These protests focused on rights to healthcare, education, public freedoms and opposing discrimination and violence – we wanted to live in a world where one could breathe and move and love more easily. But we also imagined and created new forms of kinship, community and solidarity, however fractious they tended to be.
I went to dyke demonstrations but also worked on international human rights, understanding what those limits were. And I came to understand that broader coalitions equally opposed to racism, economic injustice and colonialism were essential for any queer politics. We see how this works now in queer Marxism groups, Queers for Economic and Racial Justice, queers against apartheid, ‘alQaws, the Palestinian group against both occupation and homophobia.
How does political life today compare?Today I appreciate especially queer and feminist movements that are dedicated to healthcare and education as public goods, that are anticapitalist, committed to the struggle for racial justice, disability rights, Palestinian political freedoms, and which oppose the destruction of the Earth and indigenous lifeworlds – as evident in the work of Jasbir Puar, Sara Ahmed, Silvia Federici, Angela Davis – the work of Ni Una Menos and abolition feminism. There is now a broader vision, even though this is a time of great despair as we see global economic inequalities intensify under the pandemic.
Many gender theorists have written on your work’s direct impact on them, from Julia Serano’s sheepish recounting of your attending a poetry reading that included the line ‘Fuck Judith Butler!’, to Jordy Rosenberg’s immersive reflection ‘Gender Trouble on Mother’s Day’. What has becoming an intellectual celebrity felt like for you personally?
I have found a way to live to the side of my name. That has proven to be very helpful. I know that many queer and trans folks feel strongly about their names and I respect that. But my survival probably depends on my ability to live at a distance from my name.
Jules Joanne Gleeson is a queer historian. She is also the co-editor of Transgender Marxism
This article was edited on 7 September 2021 to reflect developments which occurred after the interview took place
nabis Industry Association. The arbitrarily capped social licensing process narrows the scope of eligible applicants with competitive lotteries for a limited number of licenses, pitting social equity applicants, or applicants from historically marginalized communities who have been disproportionately harmed by the war on drugs, against each other.
“Very few applicants are wellfunded and well-connected to deep financial networks. Almost all social equity applicants have issues with access to capital or even getting a license,” Fox says. “It often comes down to who can hire the best consultants to put together the best application, and if someone can sit on real estate or keep paying a lease until they get approved. And that can open the door to predatory partnerships that can strip away control of businesses from the people these programs are meant to help.”
But owning a dispensary or cultivation business isn’t required to be part of the cannabis industry, says Caroline Phillips, founder of the National Cannabis Festival. She doesn’t need a marijuana license to operate the festival, which this year hosted the rappers Method Man and Redman and drew an estimated 20,000 participants. Like many other Black women and minorities, Phillips was deterred from opening a dispensary due to barriers to access such as capital. Instead, she invested all her savings to produce the first annual NCF in 2016.
“The reality is many Black andbrown people face barriers to access when it comes to money and licensing,” she says. “But there are other avenues people can take, like developing a brand on social media and then licensing the name to a cultivation company that provides products for placement in dispensaries. Many of the brand names you see aren’t necessarily cannabis cultivation companies, they are strong brands that have great reach and that makes it appealing to put their name on products.”
Launching a dispensary or cultivation business costs anywhere from $750,000 to $1m. There are licensing fees, which some states have lowered to give social equity applicants easier access. For instance, when New Jersey legalized medical cannabis in 2010 the license application fee was $20,000 with proof of real estate acquisition. The adult use application fee was lowered to $100 for micro-businesses and $200 for standard businesses, with the complete application fee between $500 and $2,000. There is no capital requirement, and the legislation gives priority to minorities and those previously incarcerated.
Cannabis legalization is a laboratory for democracy, says Tahir Johnson, director of social equity and inclusion at US Cannabis Council. Johnson spoke on the Grow Your Career: Getting a Job in the Cannabis Industry panel at NCF, where he told the audience the cannabis industry is like any other corporate industry.
“It’s only right to level the playing field and give priority to people who have been victims of the war on drugs,” Johnson says. “It was made illegal to target Black and brown communities and establish a stigma on marijuana.”
Illinois has a cannabis market with a revenue of more than $1bn and was the first state to include social equity in its legislation. The state has been praised as the “gold standard” for cannabis legalization. But Johnson says the licensing for hopeful social equity applicants has been troubled. In Illinois the first round of $62m in funds took a year to distribute to social equity programs and applicants.
Toi Hutchinson, senior advisor to Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker, says navigating Covid-19 while monitoring the deliberately slow rollout of The Cannabis Regulation and Tax Act that went live on January 1, 2021 took time.
“We made policy decisions in an industry we wanted to change and now we have to make policy decisions as it’s changing,” says Hutchinson. “I’ve never seen a situation where everyone starts running in real time and Black and Brown people come out first.”
The state of Illinois now has a $32m revolving loan fund for social equity applicants financed by cannabis businesses established prior to adult use legalization. A quarter of tax revenue is funneled into the Restore, Reinvest, and Renew Program to repair communities heavily impacted by anti-marijuana laws.
The legislation doesn’t require applicants to own real estate and lowers the application fee from $5,000 to $2,500 for social equity applicants. “The criteria is not just based on the individual, but the communities. You can’t normalize and legalize an activity for which the prohibition of the exact same activity destroyed generations of communities,” says Hutchinson. “And you can’t talk about racial justice without talking about economic justice.”
In July, Virginia made history as the first state in the south to legalize adult use marijuana. The commonwealth “thoughtfully” established a cannabis authority modeled after Illinois, with social equity as a priority, says JM Pedini, development director of Norml, the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws.
“Under the Democratic majority there is a deep desire to establish an industry that creates economic opportunity for Virginians and does so in a manner that is equitable, particularly for those that have been most impacted by marijuana prohibition,” says Pedini, who also serves as the executive director of the state chapter Virginia Norml.
The social equity criteria in Virginia includes anyone who graduated from an HBCU in Virginia, anyone who has a marijuana conviction and anyone who has lived in an area determined to be disproportionately policed for marijuana crimes. All social equity applicants will also have a percentage of the license application fee waived. A cannabis reinvestment fund will distribute tax revenue from the sale of cannabis to create scholarship programs for marginalized communities and nointerest business loans for social equity applicants.
In Virginia, anyone over the age of 21 can grow up to four plants at their place of residence, making it easier for aspiring cultivators to gain necessary skills, says Jelissa Washington. Washington operates Dimebudz, a small grow project in Virginia. After using cannabis to medicate for anxiety, she soon realized the quality was inconsistent. Home cultivation allows her to conduct the research needed to produce a consistent product.
“My dream is to have a warehouse with more than 20 plants,” she says. “But I can’t think about that if I don’t qualify.”
Washington found the $10,000 application fee and $60,000 permit fee to obtain a pharmaceutical processor license under the laws established by the Virginia board of pharmacy to be a financial stretch. If she does receive a license through the cannabis equity reinvestment fund the wait to receive those funds will put her at a disadvantage, Fox says.
“Speed to market is vital in this industry, and if state governments wait to fund programs based on cannabis tax revenue, there is an implementation and funding gap making it that much more difficult for social equity applicants to establish themselves and become competitive,” he says. It can take months if not years to receive those funds, giving already established businesses a leg up in the market. “State and local governments had no problem finding the funds to carry out the war on drugs, and now they need to find the funds from day one to support social equity in the cannabis industry and restorative justice in the most impacted communities.”
Phillips is part of the advocacy group Supernova Women, an Oaklandbased organization that recently received a $2m grant for EquityWorks!, a shared use manufacturing facility that also serves as an incubator. The organization helps young women like Washington by providing cannabis industry career training. Phillips says the incubator serves as a model of how social equity should be included in the framework of the cannabis legislation in Washington DC.
“This is such a new industry, and we have the opportunity to get it right from the start and right the wrongs that have been done to communities of color,” Phillips says.
(The company has since gone on to add other products, including Smart Sheets, which track a baby’s growth, and pajamas and other sleepwear that help the camera better read your child’s nighttime movements.)
If you’re the kind of parent who simply wants to see how long their child slept the previous night, Glazer tells me, fine. But if you prefer charts and graphs about nap habits over time that rival the metrical intricacies of a spaceship launch, the Nanit can give you that, too. For the right clientele, it occurs to me, marketing this product is the equivalent of shooting fish in a barrel: your audience is sleep-addled and susceptible.
Imagine a child, Glazer tells me, who has just thrown his pacifier out of the crib for the 14th time and is wailing. If you know that it’ll take him only two more minutes of crying to put himself back to bed, but you’ll prolong that by 20 minutes if you go in to fetch the pacifier, won’t you stay outside a little longer?
I don’t have to imagine: when Ella was younger, my husband and I would often find ourselves in the wee hours inching around her floor on our stomachs like worms, hunting for various glow-in-the-dark pacifiers she’d thrown out of her crib as she stood, pouting, a mini overlord of a glowing kingdom.
In many ways, Glazer’s pitch is compelling. But I keep stumbling on the company’s messaging.
“Rest Easy, Your Crib is Covered,” reads the website’s homepage. The implication is that parents will only be able to fall asleep themselves once they know that a hi-tech camera is monitoring their child’s every move.
Why? Sids, or Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, which causes unexplained death in seemingly healthy children less than a year old. It kills about 1,300 children in the US each year, and though my pediatrician assures me that its risk plummets if you breastfeed, put babies on their backs, and don’t smoke, it’s still a panic-inducing acronym. Glazer, I figure, must viscerally understand this.
Way down in the website’s fine print, I find a disclaimer:
But it’s buried below testimonials, product descriptions and links to the company’s Pinterest page, literally the last possible thing you can read, in the teensiest type the website displays. •••
“They are very clever in how they advertise,” Dr Rachel Moon tells me about baby sleep tech devices, when I reach her at the University of Virginia, where she is the division head of general pediatrics. She also serves on the AAP’s task force on Sids and has been a practicing pediatrician for more than 30 years. “They never say that this will prevent Sids, but they come pretty close.”
A friend’s baby was born prematurely, and spent the first few months of her life being intensely monitored in the NICU. Various sleep devices like these understandably calmed my friend’s anxiety after she took her daughter home from the hospital and suddenly found herself alone with a child who, mere days before, had a team of professionals checking up on her hourly.
But for the vast majority of babies, this level of tracking is wildly unnecessary, my pediatrician assures me. A doctor wouldn’t release a child from the hospital if he or she needed it. On top of that, Moon tells me, researchers havesent hospital-grade monitors home with high-risk children and the studies show they did nothing to prevent Sids. Why would these newfangled, nonmedical versions?
“They get right up to the line so they don’t have to be regulated by the FDA, which I think is irresponsible,” Moon continues. “The vast majority of parents believe the FDA is regulating all these products.We know that’s not true. It gives you this false sense of complacency – Oh, since I have this device on, it gives me permission to do what I know I’m not supposed to do.”
So, you know your baby should be on a hard, firm mattress in a crib, but you want to cuddle at night? As long as the device is on, the reasoning might go, I can snuggle away. “They use one behavior to compensate for another behavior, which is potentially magnified with technology,”says Moon. •••
After my conversation with Moon, I slowly started to internalize that much of this data gathering serves more to bolster parental anxiety than to guarantee a desired outcome for the child.But however much I wanted to ignore the influx of information, sleep related or otherwise, I found it exceedingly difficult to look away.
And I wanted to know why: why couldn’t I just put my phone away, internalize all the research I’d done about the futility of monitoring weight gained, hours slept, inches grown?
I was somewhat reassured when I learned this impulse – to ingest data and process it – lives deep within our fish brains, embedded there after generations and generations of evolution.
“We are the only species that has this biological imperative built in to the degree we do,” Daniel J Levitin, professor emeritus of psychology and neuroscience at McGill University, tells me.
As Levitin explains, when we left the cover of trees as primates and went out onto the savannah, we became prey. In order to survive, our brain evolved to acquire and process information about the environment, other primates and that lion over there, behind the rock. Those of us with good information-gathering skills were the ones who didn’t just sit there in the wide open, twiddling our opposable thumbs and waiting for said lion to come over and turn us into a midmorning snack.
Each new hit of information we got, back then, triggered a release of dopamine – and the same is true today, except that release comes after you take a hit of ecstasy, or get an iPhone notification.
The problem is that, in the last five years alone, we’ve created more information as a species than in all of human history before it. “5,000 years ago, you’d learn about where the new fruit tree was and that was the big event of the week,” Levitin tells me. As for processing this information overload? “There’s evolutionary lag,” he continues, “and it takes about 10,000 years for our brains to catch up.”
In the modern era, with so much information bombarding us, our “attentional filter” essentially becomes clogged and stops working properly.
But even if I were able to process all the data, I wonder, to what end? My doctor has assured me that tracking, after a certain point and in most cases, is medically unnecessary. As to whatever part of me might hope to use this data to program my child to behave in a certain way – to sleep at a certain time, to gain a certain amount of weight – well, any more seasoned parent will easily tell me: you can control a child as much as you can force her to poop on command. So shouldn’t I save my money, and free up my attentional filter in the process?
Charlotte started sleeping through the night on her own by four months – no devices, no cry-it-out, she just did it. I have no idea why. Perhaps it’s because I’d become a different kind of parent, or she’s just wired a certain way. But I know, for certain, it had nothing to do with any new-fangled hi-tech sleep tracker.
I’m pregnant with No 3 now. With the baby safely in my uterus, I’m fully prepared to scrub his or her sleep life of technology. But having done this twice before, all I can say is: let’s see how smug I am when the baby actually arrives and I’m ready to hop into a smart bassinet myself. If I’ve learned anything, it’s that you can control very little when it comes to parenting – including your own convictions.
Hood-style antihero who makes a living robbing drug dealers, he represents a point of idiosyncratic moral certainty in an amoral world. “A man got to have a code,” he says: “Don’t get it twisted, I do some dirt too, but I never put my gun on no one who wasn’t in the game.” In one memorable moment, he erupts with fury when he is attacked while taking his grandma to church on a Sunday morning, having believed “ain’t no need to worry, ’cause ain’t nobody in this city that lowdown to disrespect a Sunday morning!”
The iconography created for the character was uniquely memorable. “Omar comin’!” kids yell as he arrives whistling his unexpectedly threatening signature tune The Farmer’s in His Den (known in the US as The Farmer in the Dell). He is given some of the show’s most important lines. “I got the shotgun, you got the briefcase,” he tells a lawyer whom he views as just as much a part of the drug world as he is, wearing an impudent and phallic tie over his bomber jacket.
“You come at the king, you best not miss,” he tells his enemies after a failed attempt on his life – a line sold, as always, with Williams’s indelible combination of menace and charm.
Omar walks the streets wearing just his silk pyjamas to search for Honey Nut Cheerios, his favourite breakfast cereal, protected only by his fearsome reputation. And yet when he dies, he is killed by an irrelevant young kid in a moment meant to illustrate the brutality and meaninglessness of life in district of Baltimore. His role on the streets is eventually taken in the final episode by another complex character, Michael Lee (played by Tristan Wilds), illustrating the programme’s deterministic view that a person’s life is inescapably shaped and controlled by the social structures and institutions they live under.
Despite the superstardom attained by Elba, many of The Wire’s impressive young black actors – who, like Williams, had in their early careers often been limited to generic roles – were unable to find again such substantial parts. It took Williams a while, but he eventually went on to other chunky roles in prestige TV shows such as Boardwalk Empire and The Night Of as well as smaller parts in films such as 12 Years a Slave, Gone Baby Gone and The Road. He received five Emmy nominations, including one this year for his role in Lovecraft Country.
But he was always inseparably associated with Omar Little, a once in a lifetime part. After beginning to make a name for himself with The Wire, Williams, a former dancer for George Michael and Madonna who was the son of a Bahamian mother and an American father, returned to his apartment in East Flatbush, Brooklyn, where he found locals who had once harassed him now greeting him as Omar: “No one was calling me Mike ... That’s when the lines got blurred,” he said.
It led to an identity crisis. “Mike is a beautiful man, but a gangster he is not,” David Simon has said. Williams struggled with cocaine abuse throughout the rest of his career, doing drugs, as he put it, “in scary places with scary people”.
“I was playing with fire,” he said in 2012. “It was just a matter of time before I got caught and my business ended up on the cover of a tabloid or I went to jail or, worse, I ended up dead. When I look back on it now, I don’t know how I didn’t end up in a body bag.” His death is reportedly being investigated as a possible drug overdose.
Williams was so high when he met Obama in 2008 he was unable to speak. But the meeting with the future president had a decisive impact on him. He later recalled: “Hearing my name come out of his mouth woke me up. I realised that my work could actually make a difference.” As well as taking roles in productions that focused on the criminal justice system, such as The Night Of and When They See Us, he was the American Civil Liberties Union’s ambassador for ending mass incarceration, and fronted and executive produced a documentary series about illegal livelihoods with Vice, Black Market – something he called his “most personal project”.
However, it was his embodiment of Omar that really faced the US with the true human cost of the carnage in some of its inner cities, and how it truly feels to be on the frontline. On Tuesday, Wendell Pierce, who played Bunk, his adversary in the Baltimore police force, tweeted a piece of video from 2014 in which he pays tribute to Williams while his co-star is standing next to him.
Pierce says: “He is one of the great American actors, giving voice and giving flesh to characters that most people would have never given the same humanity to. Opening a window to a world of men that we pass by or don’t know about … Art is the place where we reflect on who we are and he has made people think twice and give humanity to these men.” In that achievement lay Williams’s brilliance.
Omar’s greatest scenes
He was fearsome, funny when the mood took him and – for a drug-robbing stick-up man working the streets of Baltimore – surprisingly moral. Here, Phil Harrison picks five of his greatest moments.
Bird’s Trial (season one)
In one of the greatest courtroom scenes in TV history, Omar testifies against Bell/Barksdale heavy Bird. Bird’s solicitor Levy calls Omar “a parasite”, preying on the sickness of the city. Omar stops him in his tracks. “Just like you man … I got the shotgun and you got the briefcase. But it’s all in the game.” The moral heart of The Wire lies in this single exchange.
On the bench with Bunk (Season three)
The ambiguity of Omar’s lifestyle is laid clear in this brilliant two-hander with Detective Bunk Moreland (Wendall Pierce). As Moreland lays out the damage done to the community by drug wars, a range of emotions flicker across Omar’s face: rage, resolve, even a touch of shame. It’s a subtle, nuanced performance, Omar’s face reflecting the trap set for every resident of East Baltimore’s projects. “The game is out there” as he says later, “and it’s either play or get played.”
Omar vs Stringer (season three)
“If you come at the king, you best not miss”. Omar’s rage towards the Bell/ Barksdale organisation was fuelled by their challenge to his primacy on the streets. But it also had roots in the torture inflicted on his lover Brandon by their henchmen. Omar’s sexuality was a revolutionary piece of writing, brilliantly realised. He was simultaneously an alpha male in one of the toughest neighbourhoods in the US and a gay man who saw no reason to care who knew it.
Honey Nut Cheerios (season four)
He’s only nipped out for some cigarettes and some breakfast cereal. But by now, Omar’s name goes before him. Strolling languidly along in his silk pyjamas, Omar – or rather his reputation – clears the streets. He gets his Honey Nut Cheerios, his cigarettes, and, without even trying, a bin liner full of crack phials too.
Death (season five)
Omar’s death was sudden and horribly arbitrary. Despite goading the most dangerous gangsters in Baltimore, he dies at the hands of a child who is so small he can hardly get his fingers around the trigger of the gun he’s holding. His ending is ignominious – his body isn’t even correctly tagged in the mortuary. He was just another anonymous black victim of drug violence. Of course, we knew he was so much more than that. As, it was implied, were all the show’s victims.
Brooklyn locals who had once harassed him now started greeting him as Omar