It’s a remarkable cast, with Beanie Feldstein nailing the toughest role of her young career, using her resemblance to the intern to show both the promise and professional spark of the young woman along with the obsessions that derailed her.
Other portrayals may have been aided by prosthetics. The terrific Annaleigh Ashford gives a naturalistic performance as Paula Jones (with the help of an enhanced nose). Clive Owen makes a plausible Bill Clinton, matching his makeup with an accurate cadence of the familiar voice.
But frequent Murphy star Sarah Paulson is making the most complete transformation of her career as Tripp (and that includes the time the actress played a two headed woman). So subsumed is she into her frumpy, raging, frustrated character, there’s rarely a trace of the Paulson we knew. The creation is not overly reliant on makeup; she creates a voice, adds a signature walk and has a whole set of business with her fingers.
It’s thrilling to see, in the first episode, that it’s Edie Falco portraying Hillary Clinton. But once we finally hear her speak, several episodes in, she sounds more like Carmella Soprano than the former Democratic presidential candidate.
The tasty cameos keep coming, with Billy Eichner as Matt Drudge, Cobie Smulders as a scheming Ann Coulter, Margo Martindale as publisher Lucianne Goldberg, Mira Sorvino as Monica’s mom, Taran Killam as Paula Jones’ husband, Blair Underwood as Vernon Jordan, and Judith Light as right wing operative Susan Carpenter-McMillan.
The 10-hour format may be a bit long, leading to lengthy montages of, say, Tripp’s tape recording adventures. By the seventh episode, the actual articles impeachment hadn’t even been filed.
Like other installments of “American Crime Story,” it makes recent history alive again, and tells us something about where we are today as a result, using the kind of details that surprise and enthrall us all over again.