2023 - 2023
White House Plumbers is a five-episode HBO limited series that ran in May and June 2023. It takes the most consequential political scandal of the twentieth century, the Watergate break-in, and retells it as a dark farce about the two men who bungled the job. Woody Harrelson plays E. Howard Hunt. Justin Theroux plays G. Gordon Liddy. The pair were Nixon's "plumbers", so nicknamed because their White House brief was to fix "leaks". What they actually did was break into the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate complex on June 17, 1972, with bugged walkie-talkies and $100 bills in sequential serial numbers, and get caught because one of them taped over a door lock and left the tape on when a security guard came through.
The show is adapted from Egil Krogh and Matthew Krogh's memoir Integrity: Good People, Bad Choices, and Life Lessons from the White House. Egil Krogh ran the plumbers project originally. His son Matthew co-wrote the book after his father's death. That provenance matters, because the series is pulled between two instincts. It wants to laugh at Hunt and Liddy and it wants to take seriously what they actually did to American democracy.
David Mandel directs all five episodes. Alex Gregory and Peter Huyck wrote the scripts. All three came off Veep, and you can feel that show's fingerprints on every scene. The comedy is in the detail: four failed break-in attempts before the successful one, the Cuban-exile burglars arguing over logistics in the basement, Liddy holding his hand over a candle to prove his loyalty, Hunt pitching his wife on the operation as if it's a novel he is trying to sell.
Harrelson and Theroux carry the show, and their chemistry is the whole point. Harrelson's Hunt is a former CIA officer and pulp spy novelist, a bourbon drinker who loves his wife and believes Nixon is the only thing standing between America and ruin. His loyalty is bottomless and his tradecraft is decades out of date. Theroux's Liddy runs on a different delusion altogether. A former FBI agent who talks constantly about honour, mutters in German, holds his palm over open flames, and treats the whole operation as a sacred mission. They are both ridiculous. They are both real.
The supporting bench is the Veep-alumni reunion you would expect:
Yul Vazquez
Liddy contact
Corbin Bernsen
John N. Mitchell
Kim Coates
Frank Sturgis
Justin Theroux
G. Gordon Liddy
Lena Headey
Dorothy Hunt
Ike Barinholtz
Bill
Toby Huss
Bernard "Macho" Barker
Kathleen Turner
Dita Beard
Nixon himself is never shown on screen. He is a voice on a tape, a presence, an order that comes down the chain. That absence is a deliberate choice and it works.
Tonally this is closer to The Death of Stalin than to All the President's Men. The period production design is strong. Early seventies Washington looks right: the wood panelling, the rotary phones, the wide ties, the cigarette haze in every office, the Lincoln Continentals. But the camera is almost never sombre. Scenes that would play as tense thrillers in another Watergate dramatisation play as cringe comedy here. The four-try break-in sequence is essentially a heist movie rewritten as slapstick. It works because the actors commit completely and never signal that they are in a comedy. Harrelson and Theroux play every absurd moment straight.
The show's big swing is its faith that the source material is funnier than any invention. Most of the most embarrassing details actually happened. The sequential serial numbers on the bribe money. The tape on the door. The CREEP meeting where Liddy presents "Operation Gemstone", a plan that included kidnapping journalists and hiring prostitutes on a houseboat. You cannot parody this material because the material is already parody.
Underneath the farce, the series is asking a question that feels sharper now than it would have in 2013. What happens when loyal, well-dressed, patriotic men decide the rules do not apply to their side? Hunt and Liddy genuinely believe they are saving the country. They think the people they are surveilling are the real criminals. They think Nixon deserves a second term and that anything done to secure it is justified. The show lets them be funny and lets them be dangerous at the same time.
Two clowns almost destroyed the Republic, and they were convinced they were heroes the entire time.
That is the thesis. It sounds glib until you watch the closing episodes, where the comedy starts to curdle. Hunt's family life bends under the pressure. The Cuban exiles get abandoned by the men who promised to protect them. Dorothy Hunt becomes the unlikely moral centre. By the end the laughs have a cost attached.
Reception was mixed. Some critics loved the tonal gamble and thought Harrelson and Theroux had never been better. Others felt the farce undercut the seriousness of what Watergate actually meant, and that the comedy of manners approach left the political stakes under-developed. The New York Times was relatively warm. The Guardian was lukewarm. Reviews that came in expecting something like The Offer, which plays its period tick-tock material mostly straight, were not sure what to do with a show that keeps interrupting its own gravity for a pratfall. Reviews that came in expecting the HBO political comedy of Veep with historical stakes had a better time.
Viewership was modest but respectable for a limited series. No major awards traction, which stung given the cast.
White House Plumbers is not the definitive Watergate drama and it is not trying to be. What it is is a sharp, sometimes uncomfortable argument that the great political scandals are often staffed by the kind of vain, self-deluding men who should not be trusted to run a corner shop, let alone a covert operation. I went in expecting a dry reconstruction and got a buddy comedy about the end of the American consensus. That was not what I signed up for and it is the reason the show stayed with me. I kept thinking about it for weeks after the finale, which is more than I can say for most five-episode limited series.
If you enjoyed the institutional horror comedy of Chernobyl or the moral ambiguity of Succession, you will find a lot to like. If you enjoyed The Dropout or Inventing Anna, which also sit in the true-story-as-character-study genre, the framing will feel familiar. The HBO comedy DNA of Curb Your Enthusiasm and Silicon Valley runs through every failed-heist sequence.
Not every episode lands, and the tonal shifts occasionally wobble. But the central performances are so committed, and the historical detail so precise, that the wobbles become part of the texture. This is a five-hour watch about two men who thought they were James Bond and turned out to be Laurel and Hardy. Only the consequences were real.
Liam James
Supporting role
Woody Harrelson
E. Howard Hunt
Rich Sommer
John Magruder
Domhnall Gleeson
John Dean
Judy Greer
Mildred Morgan