'Clinton' explores how society has evolved

By: HANK STUEVER | The Washington Post
Published: February 20, 2012

As we get more into the nitty-gritty of the 21st century, the 1990s die of neglect.

The goodbye process takes about 15 years, but once you notice that a decade is gone, you really, really notice it: Whitney Houston departs the earthly realm from a Beverly Hills hotel room bathtub. Your new hire lets it casually slip that he was born in 1991. The IT guys finally haul off the last of the humpbacked Dell monitors from the Cubicles of the Doomed. Whoomp, there it was.

"Clinton," a four-hour PBS "American Experience" documentary airing tonight and Tuesday (9 p.m. each night on UNC-TV), is an honest but sometimes tediously predictable exercise in the further Wikipedia-ing of those years.

Whether intentional or subliminal, the film conveys the obvious and completely mortal recognition of time's inevitable passage, but not much else.

Part of the problem is that the Clintons are still very much with us; legacies are still jelling. As Secretary of State, Hillary is engaged in the most important work of her career, while Bill prefers a superhero's schedule. To the right's everlasting horror, Clinton could show up anywhere, anytime.

And they are still baffled by his resilience, especially the fast rehab of his reputation after the House impeached him in 1998. They've watched in vain as he has ascended to elder statesman. They've watched people love him in spite of his sins.

"Clinton" makes the decade of the 1990s look bleak and practically sepia-toned. It asks us to imagine a world that was only on the verge of having a 24-hour news cycle, a more quaint society. Newsweek got nervous about publishing reporter Michael Isikoff's explosive discovery of the Lewinsky affair, so Lucianne Goldberg sent the news to a fairly obscure Internet gossip named Matthew Drudge.

You can almost hear the crackle and hiss of an AOL dial-up. The people who feasted on Clinton scandal, dirt, pitfalls and defeats were miners panning for a new gold. The hyperwired frenzy we now live with is surely as much a legacy of the Clinton era as welfare reform and "don't ask, don't tell."

All of which means "Clinton" is not for anyone still operating under a pleated-pants delusion that not much time has passed.