Enter Stage Right

In Impeachment: American Crime Story, Billy Eichner and Cobie Smulders play side characters who’d love to control the narrative.

- OLIVIA NUZZI

THE SERIES Impeachment: American Crime Story is an embarrassment of riches for viewers obsessed with the camp political and media culture of the late 1990s. By viewers, I mean myself and my friends in the Washington press corps, with whom I improperly shared my FX login credentials. The show’s creator, Ryan Murphy, sold me on the details: Margo Martindale as Lucianne Goldberg, swilling a martini and rasping into a landline. Sarah Paulson as Linda Tripp, tapping a scoop of SlimFast into her blender. George Salazar as George Conway, crawling out of his skin as he swans about a cocktail party with the social circle he will betray in the next century. Beanie Feldstein as Monica Lewinsky, unaware of how far the grisly details of her affair with the president have already traveled, wailing into an FBI agent’s chest, “You can’t tell anyone.” And Annaleigh Ashford as Paula Jones, whispering “Oh mah Gawd” throughout in a twang that rings like a mandolin.

Two unexpected highlights are Billy Eichner as dot-com town crier Matt Drudge and Cobie Smulders as far-right cable Cruella de Vil Ann Coulter. Drudge and Coulter are naturally cartoonish personalities who share a guiding value: Drudge would do anything to get the story, and Coulter would do anything to talk about the story and contort it to advance her political agenda. Eichner’s Drudge is a little ridiculous because Drudge is a little ridiculous, but he plays him with a certain dignity, elevating a performance that could have easily been an