'White House Plumbers' creators found a new spin on Watergate Los Angeles Times

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• Escobar Plumbing & Jetting
• Review: ‘White House Plumbers’ reenacts the mishaps of Watergate’s operatives for laughs
• Review: Brilliantly acted, HBO’s ‘The Regime’ flirts with satire but lacks political bite
• Reviews for Los Angeles plumbing companies
• On how much was fictionalized for the series
• In new edition of classic Watergate expose, Woodward and Bernstein link Nixon, Trump

Even with Julia Roberts as its star, Gaslit got lost in the avalanche of great television that continues to arrive, and White House Plumbers may share the same fate. Here, the mood is more satirical, and it veers into slapstick, although it tries to balance that with a strand of serious family and personal drama. It has a slick elegance to it, but it never quite feels as if it pulls the many elements together successfully.

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That’s not to say that “White House Plumbers” isn’t interesting or watchable, or sometimes as funny as it wants to be; there’s too much talent behind and in front of the camera for that to be the case. There’s some fine bumbling in the burglary scenes. The production is first-rate, the period work never rings false, crowd scenes are not threadbare, and choice D.C.

Review: ‘White House Plumbers’ reenacts the mishaps of Watergate’s operatives for laughs

We certainly didn't lean into it, but we wanted it there. That kind of gives you a little bit of perspective, you get the modern-day perspective on Watergate and you kind of get this 50-year perspective on what's going on right now in our government. If Gordon Liddy existed nowadays, he'd be in a chat room somewhere.

Review: Brilliantly acted, HBO’s ‘The Regime’ flirts with satire but lacks political bite

Even though it came back to bite him, Nixon’s willingness to break the law — and order others to break it — does seem to mark the beginning of a win-by-any-means age. Right away, you know this new White House Plumbers series is in great hands. Specifically, it's in the hands of writers and creators Alex Gregory and Peter Huyck, both of whom worked on HBO's Veep and The Larry Sanders Show. The director of multiple episodes is David Mandel, who directed episodes of Veep and Curb Your Enthusiasm.

He's actually oddly a very modern character who was mostly obsessed with getting famous, and he really didn't care how it happened. He would have been happy to have had some sort of a scandal. He talked a big game, but didn't actually serve in the war and never quite actually killed anyone and had these delusions. There's a desperation to him that's part of why he's so dangerous. Parts of White House Plumbers are laugh-out-loud outrageous – but other parts do make you feel for some of these people, and, of course, compare that scandal to more contemporary ones.

Liddy calls black ops “black bag”, to the hilarity of the CIA stalwarts he is dealing with. Liddy is not a man who enjoys being laughed at, although the schemes he tries to pitch to Dean are frequently absurd. There are times, in reading this, playing it and watching it, where there's almost something kind of adorable or corny. Nixon could be shamed enough to actually resign. Whereas now there's been so many impeachments of both Republican and Democratic presidents.

And the many executive producers include Frank Rich, who's also an executive producer on Succession. So this group knows how to tell a story in unexpected ways, and to find the humor even in the more serious situations. The actors Justin Theroux (left) and Woody Harrelson play G. Howard Hunt in the new HBO miniseries White House Plumbers. Professional plumbers do not expect a tip.

The ultimate political scandal has been an ever-flowing fount of pop culture practically since the moment resigned president Richard Nixon flashed double peace signs and boarded his helicopter out of Washington. Gordon Liddy, the lawyer and former F.B.I. agent played by Justin Theroux. Hunt and Liddy are well-known to historians and Watergate buffs, but they are — compared to a Dean, Haldeman or Mitchell — secondary players in a scandal that toppled a presidency and whose particulars have faded from the popular memory over five decades. Theroux invests his speech with a psychotic precision that doesn’t resemble the real Liddy, yet it gets the point across. Nothing in Hunt’s biography, on the other hand, seems especially humorous, but Harrelson plays him at medium-high boil, with a thrusting chin and gravelly voice and often in some sort of emotional extremity.

Gordon Liddy are part of the "White House Plumbers". Charged with plugging press leaks by any means necessary, they accidentally overturned the Presidency they were trying to protect.

Like some people who get bullied, they look for sources of strength in odd places. In 1972, they attempted to break into the Democratic National Committee offices at the Watergate. They were caught, and the scandal ultimately led to Nixon's resignation two years later, after his administration repeatedly tried to cover up their involvement. "I certainly never thought of it as a comedy because to me, it's such a horrific period in American history," director David Mandel told NPR's Leila Fadel. "I keep calling it a tragedy that makes you laugh." And there are elements, of course, that speak to our present condition.

They were called the Plumbers because, well, plumbers locate and stop leaks. Its attempts to be a jack of all trades sometimes make it a master of none. The pace is meandering, which is odd, considering there is so much happening, and it doesn’t pick up steam until well into episode two; Watergate non-aficionados may not make it that far. Theroux turns the volume up to 11 as Liddy, while Harrelson has more depth to find, with a more rounded backstory of family strife and money troubles.

Together, they enact an on-again, off-again battling bromance — a temperamentally mismatched but ideologically compatible couple, as in countless buddy-cop flicks, with the difference being that they’re failures. Outside of home repair, the word “plumbers” nowadays most quickly brings to mind a pair of Italian brothers in overalls. In an earlier time, it might have conjured up the group behind the caper that led to a cover-up that led to a committee that led to a presidential resignation, and that has doomed us to live forever with the suffix “—gate” attached to any kind of scandal. The principals in this particular telling of the story are E. Howard Hunt, played by Woody Harrelson, and G.

He is a violent geyser ready to blow at any moment. He takes his job very seriously indeed and his favourite LP is a collection of Hitler speeches, which he likes to play at dinner parties, as his terrifyingly obedient children watch on. Still, there was no shortage of study material. As Huyck says, “All the President’s Men” is “the ne plus ultra” of Watergate entertainment.

The dialogue is rich throughout White House Plumbers, and so are the performances and characters. Harrelson is wonderful — exploding like Ralph Kramden one minute, simmering like Macbeth the next — and the supporting cast is a very deep bench, serving up unexpected treasures every episode. There's Kathleen Turner as lobbyist Dita Beard! And Lena Headey from Game of Thrones as Hunt's wife, Dorothy! And Gary Cole as FBI executive Mark Felt – who, though he's not identified as such here, in real life was the infamous Deep Throat of All the President's Men. It opens with the second of four Watergate break-in attempts, and the emphasis is on how terrible these “plumbers” – so-called because they are brought together to “fix the leaks” coming out of the White House – actually are.

White House Plumbers: this Watergate drama’s cast is dazzling. Unfortunately, it’s terrible - The Guardian

White House Plumbers: this Watergate drama’s cast is dazzling. Unfortunately, it’s terrible.

Posted: Sat, 27 May 2023 07:00:00 GMT [source]

There are nods to current populist rhetoric, particularly in some of Liddy and Hunt’s more provocative statements. “It’s just you and me against the entire radical left. Let the record show that Gordon Liddy shits red, white and blue,” barks Liddy. Hunt, a former CIA agent still fuming from the Bay of Pigs fiasco, and Liddy, whose tenure with the FBI did not end well, had plenty in common.

(The title comes from how they were known for "fixing leaks.") The series slightly elevates its comedy here. Harrelson and Theroux ham up liberally recounted events that have some shred of truth, and flourish in a passage about investigating the therapist of Daniel Ellsberg (who famously released the Pentagon Papers). We watch Liddy and Hunt, in bafflingly fake wigs, do dumb things like pose in front of the camera used during a break-in (only made worse when Hunt doesn’t take the film out before it reaches the authorities later on). It’s Coen brothers-lite with the bittersweetness of history and a looming sense of how ill-conceived each move is. Their patriotism isn’t just inflating their hubris; it will get them in serious trouble. A five-part series that tells the true story of how Nixon's own political saboteurs and Watergate masterminds, E.