For most people old enough to remember where they were when the Clinton-Lewinsky sex scandal froze the world, all that remains of the incident today is the memory of a media circus filled with absurdities and public mockery. The third season of America Crime Story is an attempt at humanizing the scandal, showing how the ambitions and passions of the involved persons intersected and, like random chemicals being added to a volatile mixture, exploded in the biggest cultural clusterfuck of the 90s.

Impeachment differs greatly from its two American Crime Story predecessors in that the crime in question had no victims in the conventional sense. The consequences of that are most apparent in the first few episodes, which plod along at a languid pace and are at times difficult to commit to because of their heavy focus on Linda Tripp. Sarah Paulson’s portrayal of the real-life whistleblower is shockingly well done, ironically to such an extent that it’s hard to stomach her as the focal character during the first half of the season. Tripp is what you might call the original “Karen”; a curmudgeonly middle-aged lady who has terrible fashion, a sneering nasally voice, and a soul-destroying office job at the Pentagon. The show makes it all too clear that her desire for attention and revenge against Clinton for her “demotion” from the White House to the Pentagon is the engine that bring the story into fruition. Again, it’s tough to stick with a story in which the plot is driven by the selfish ambitions of an unlikable main character, but as a show invested in telling the truth as much as possible, Impeachment beckons you to stick with it as things build to its much more exciting second half. As she’s confronted with the consequences of her actions, Tripp continues to claim she did it to “save” Monica from being exploited by the POTUS, but in the end it all comes down to simple revenge from a grumpy woman who was deprived of one of few things in life that she was happy with.

Tripp’s journey into infamy is surrounded by the similarly selfish ambitions of just about everyone involved in the scandal, and Impeachment makes admirable efforts to not paint any of them as being particularly villainous in their pursuits (although the showrunners’ left wing leanings do creep in every so often, especially with the somewhat gushing portrayal of Hillary Clinton). In one corner are the women who started it all: Monica Lewinsky, Linda Tripp, and Paula Jones. All three are guilty of their own self interests amid the scandal: Monica for her love of Clinton and a cushy job, Tripp for her vengeance, and Jones for wanting to push her case beyond reasonable limits. In the second corner is the White House, with Clive Owen in an excellently nuanced portrayal of Bill Clinton. A clever and charismatic leader undermined by his own impulses, the POTUS is well-meaning at first, but happily throws Monica to the wolves in an effort to save his presidency. In the final corner is the Office of Independent Council led by Ken Starr, and conservative media embodied by Matt Drudge, Susan Carpenter-McMillan and Ann Coulter (played by Cobie Smulders, who captures her voice and mannerisms with photocopy-like accuracy). They are the wolves banging on Clinton’s door, using both Tripp, Lewinsky and Jones as assets in their campaign to take down the president.

All these parties engage in a constant push and pull with each other to further their own agendas with little consideration of collateral damage, and the show would have become a tiring exercise in loathsome selfishness were it not for its most important character, Monica Lewinsky. As the one person whose path intersects with the most characters, her emotional turmoil from being exploited by just about everyone she comes across outside her family and friends is what keeps the audience invested. It’s impossible not to feel at least a bit sad when she’s surrounded by giant-like FBI agents, the result of her one friend in the Pentagon betraying her in truly stomach-turning fashion. Impeachment presents a multi-faceted view of the woman who started it all, and although she spends much of the time being shell-shocked by everything that’s happening, Monica manages at several critical moments to stand up for herself (most notably when she resists a squad of FBI agents intent on forcing her cooperation by insisting on calling her mother for help), making her the closest thing the show has to a protagonist we can root for.

In the end, the whole scandal turned out to generally be a waste of time, with no net benefit for most of the involved. Bill Clinton was not impeached, Ken Starr’s entire effort was unsuccessful, Paula Jones demeaned herself in an adult magazine to pay her legal fees, Linda Tripp became a social pariah, and of course Monica would forever bear the stigma of the woman who gave the most powerful man in the world a blowjob. However, the most important moment for her occurs at the very end, when she ducks away from the clamor of the book signing to calm her nerves, repeatedly saying, “I’ll be okay” as she steps into the next phase of her life. She’s been through hell and was dragged from one emotional breakdown to another, with the rest of her life likely to continue being a struggle, but at the end of the day she will survive. Impeachment’s tale of scandal does its utmost to be truthful to history, and the end result is rife with the moral greyness of real life and a lack of definitive resolution. But where the show truly succeeds is portraying the survival of Monica Lewinsky from a crisis that would have forever destroyed many other women, taking her from a simple pop culture figure of the 90s into someone we can continue rooting for in real life long after the dust has settled.