It’s not hard to picture the team behind HBO’s “White House Plumbers” finishing work on an episode of “Veep” and picturing that stellar comedy’s tone being applied to the idiots behind the Watergate break-in. (The director of all five episodes here is David Mandel, showrunner on that massive critical darling.) And as the country once again goes through considerations of impeachment and general malfeasance in the highest offices of the United States, the timing seems just right for a scathing look at one of the key points in our continuing disillusionment with the government. But other than a brief nod to how one of the key Watergate players helped seed the garden for distrust of American politics that could really be traced from Watergate to January 6th, the majority of “White House Plumbers” feels surprisingly shallow and toothless. Hey, did you know that was one of the most formative events in U.S. history? Political history was really a clown car driven by two egocentric morons? That’s about the extent of the history lesson for anyone even loosely familiar with the events of Watergate, resulting in a show with a few good laughs and one stand-out performance but too little creative fluid coursing through its pipes.
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Creators Alex Gregory & Peter Huyck use the book “Integrity: Good People, Bad Choices and Life Lessons from the White House” as inspiration for a show named after the covert group that was really actually known as the White House Plumbers. As revealed in the second episode, they took that name because they were responsible for stopping any leaks from the Nixon White House, one of the most historically paranoid places on Earth, and their first major task was finding dirt on Daniel Ellsberg after he leaked the Pentagon Papers. The problem is that the people put in charge of this very off-book operation were E. Howard Hunt (Woody Harrelson) and G. Gordon Liddy (Justin Theroux) are two men with enough political connections to get them in trouble but not enough intelligence to figure out how to get out of it.
Hunt is a fascinating figure, a CIA operative who was practically Gump-esque in his ability to be there at major moments in history in the ‘60s and ‘70s. However, by the time of the 1972 election, he had fallen pretty far down the political ladder, thanks in no small part to the stink of his involvement with the Bay of Pigs invasion and even rumors that he had something to do with John F. Kennedy’s assassination. “White House Plumbers” and Harrelson play Hunt as a constantly desperate man, someone with four country club memberships that he’s increasingly unable to pay. He’s almost always in a state of panic, watching people like John Dean (Domhnall Gleeson) and Jeb Magruder (Ike Barinholtz) look down on how far Hunt has fallen and keenly aware of how much something covert can suddenly be international news. When the Plumbers come along, Hunt tries to see it as a legitimate chance to help his country again and reclaim his reputation, and his wife Dorothy (Lena Headey) supports him, even as their troubled home life starts to get in the way.
“White House Plumbers” often plays like a buddy comedy with Hunt and the truly eccentric G. Gordon Liddy (an excellent Justin Theroux) trading barbs, insults, and political jokes. Liddy is one of history’s most notorious political wild cards, someone who used to burn his hand in a lit candle to prove his commitment to a cause. Theroux’s take on Liddy is easily the best thing about “White House Plumbers” as “The Leftovers” star finds a way to convey dangerous instability without chewing scenery. Hunt knows his career is circling the drain; Liddy loves it by the drain because he can get away with more of his crazy ideas. The five episodes become something like a slow-motion car crash as Hunt and his family are pulled into Liddy’s increasingly manic schemes. The early scenes in the better half of the series have the air of a horror movie because viewers know where this is going, and yet Hunt ignores the warning signs like when an early dinner party between the Hunts and Liddys—Judy Greer plays wife Fran—ends up with Gordon playing his favorite Hitler speeches. Again, Theroux doesn’t make Liddy ‘likable’ in a broad comedy sense, but his unhinged logic becomes fascinating and easily the most entertaining aspect of the series. He says things like “A dead dog chases…no cars” like it has great meaning.
Either Harrelson or Theroux are in almost every scene, but they get some great character actors to bounce off, including Kim Coates, Yul Vazquez, Toby Huss, Gary Cole, John Carroll Lynch, F. Murray Abraham, and more. It’s a show filled with talented, funny people, and they generally make smart decisions, especially Theroux, Gleeson, and Barinholtz. Harrelson ends up with more mixed results, sometimes feeling like he’s making easy choices instead of getting to the root of what drove Hunt, which is a problem given he’s the lead of the series. He goes broad with a speech impression of Hunt and falls back on a crutch of “looking angry/confused” too often. However, a lot of the issues with Harrelson’s mediocre performance here go back to the writing, which is way too content to merely add a few jokes to the Wikipedia highlights of this story. The scripts for “White House Plumbers” simply lack the ambition of something like “Veep” or even last year’s “Gaslit.” It’s a tough line to walk to give sharp dialogue to bumbling idiots, but there’s a version of “WHP” that’s just smarter as it details so much abject stupidity.
In the end, what do we take away from “White House Plumbers” beyond a reminder that Justin Theroux remains consistent in comedy as much as drama? Not much really. Hunt and Liddy may have made history, but they were just the beginning, and Mandel and company don’t seem interested enough in asking what door these doofuses opened that’s still not shut over five decades later. They say the insanity of the Trump era led to the death of political satire because truth became so much stranger than fiction. Maybe a decade or so ago, “White House Plumbers” might have been a more shocking study of our idiocracy. Now it’s almost quaint. [C]
‘White House Plumbers” premieres May 1 on HBO.
