New HBO show 'White House Plumbers' revisits the Watergate scandal : NPR

Table Of Content

• Review: Brilliantly acted, HBO’s ‘The Regime’ flirts with satire but lacks political bite
• Where to Watch
• Now playing
• In ‘Mr. Bates vs The Post Office,’ Toby Jones is the quiet, stubborn leader of a resistance
• ‘The Sympathizer’ is a tense black comedy that’s also a moving story about friendship
• After scandal, movie producer Randall Emmett is flying under the radar with a new name

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.

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

White House Plumbers Cast and Character Guide - MovieWeb

White House Plumbers Cast and Character Guide.

Posted: Sat, 16 Sep 2023 07:00:00 GMT [source]

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.

Where to Watch

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.

Now playing

They both loved Nixon and hated John Kennedy and the counterculture, which they saw as a threat to patriotism and the American way of life. Dismissed by the White House press secretary as a “third-rate burglary,” the break-in set off a chain of events that ultimately led to the resignation of President Richard M. Nixon in August 1974. Ever since, the “gate” suffix has been shorthand for scandal, and Watergate has provided fodder for movies, books, podcasts, commentaries and television. Harrelson has even more screen time than Hunt, with the show trying to understand how misguided Hunt was.

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.

But it’s more of a journalism thriller than a study of political scandal. Oliver Stone’s “Nixon” dips into Watergate, but within the larger context of the president operating behind the scenes. But there’s always another angle, and HBO’s five-part limited series “White House Plumbers” found a juicy one. Created by the team behind “Veep,” this is the Watergate of E.

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.

How ‘Veep’ Led to ‘White House Plumbers’ and Why Watergate (With a New Spin) Is Ripe for Revisiting - imdb

How ‘Veep’ Led to ‘White House Plumbers’ and Why Watergate (With a New Spin) Is Ripe for Revisiting.

Posted: Sat, 20 Apr 2024 07:29:17 GMT [source]

‘The Sympathizer’ is a tense black comedy that’s also a moving story about friendship

They leave incriminating films in cameras. They have the wrong tools (“the right tools are in Miami”). The bugs they leave behind turn out to be inoperable.

After scandal, movie producer Randall Emmett is flying under the radar with a new name

Gordon Liddy (Justin Theroux), the real-life blinkered zealots who, er, masterminded the break-in and took the brunt of the fall when everything went south. It’s a combination buddy comedy/buddy tragedy about a pair of true believers who keep charging ahead through blind loyalty and a desperate need to grind axes, even as the walls close in. We’ve seen the Watergate story through the eyes of the reporters who broke it (1976’s “All the President’s Men”). We’ve seen it through the eyes of White House counsel John Dean (the 1979 miniseries “Blind Ambition”). We’ve even seen it through the eyes of two teenage girls (the underappreciated 1999 comedy “Dick”).

(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.

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.