Many of us know parts of the story of President Richard Nixon’s fall from grace, leading to his 1974 resignation. Two years before, Nixon’s paranoid streak had led to greenlighting the 1972 so-called White House Plumbers break-in at Democratic Party offices in DC’s posh Watergate Hotel, orchestrated by Attorney General John Mitchell. As a tween, I watched the political scandal unfurl on the nightly news over family dinners, with my outraged lefty father screaming at the TV and broadcaster “Uncle” Walter Cronkite while we booed Nixon alongside him. But, as I picked my way through adolescence, I didn’t know the epic details of the story “Gaslit” reveals.
Based on the first season of Leon Neyfakh’s granular “Slow Burn” podcast, with “Mr. Robot’s” Robbie Pickering as showrunner, the eight-part limited series flips the script. It puts Mitchell’s wife Martha at its center and reexamines the scandal from the bottom up and the inside out. Like a team out of misfits out of “Ted Lasso,” the nearly-forgotten players – John Dean, J. Gordon Liddy, and E. Howard Hunt among them – are explored and exposed, with A.G. Mitchell ultimately having to make a choice of allegiance between his bestie the 37th President and his beloved wife.
Get ready for Julia Roberts (who also produced) as Arkansas native Mrs. Mitchell. The voluble Southern-style hostess who’s rival for total inside-the-beltway social domination on the elite scene was First Lady Pat Nixon herself. Beautiful, boozy and shrewd, Martha’s the life of the party – with a tendency to leak vital info to the press. When she tumbles to the reality of the 1972 Watergate B&E, and the leadership role her doting duplicitous husband John (Sean Penn) played, she becomes a loose end that he chooses to indelicately “handle,” making her doubly dangerous to the Nixon cause.
As Mr. Mitchell jets to Washington to clean up his party’s mess, he leaves his wife guarded under lock and key in California. She’s held hostage in her own hotel room, man-handled, sedated and cut off from all outside contact. It’s a stunning betrayal by a husband whose loyalties are elsewhere, and a reflection of a larger betrayal of the body politic. As Martha, the powerful arm candy turned political liability, Roberts has never been better, richer, funnier or fuller in her embodiment of a character. Whether she’s having a nervous breakdown during a party of DC elites or sitting opposite her husband in a private plane with a drained stricken face that has dropped its make-up mask. Her Martha’s someone who never saw herself as a victim, and is shocked and discombobulated to find herself cast in that role, the fall girl, the punchline – Cassandra.
While crusading Penn has become increasingly uninteresting off-camera, the actor is sharp and canny inside the prosthetic fat suit that he dons to play Mr. Mitchell. In contrast to the similarly transformed Jared Leto in the egregious “House of Gucci,” Penn makes this Mitchell real, his eyes conveying conflicted layers of feeling from beneath prosthetics and make-up that make him unrecognizable.
As John Dean, Dan Stevens (“Downton Abbey”) nails both his ambition, awkwardness and gradual awakening to how the game is played in Washington, and his part in it. Of the rest of the talented ensemble, Shea Whigham (“Boardwalk Empire”) stands out as the wily G-man and chief operative G. Gordon Liddy, alongside Betty Gilpin as Maureen “Mo” Dean and Nat Faxon as Bob Haldeman.
The script has bounce, revealing its panoramic ensemble with energy and assurance. It’s entertaining and informative and, like Martha herself, who was in her fifties when this played out, seems to have no fucks left to give.
History is written by the winners. Wait 50 years, or five centuries, and the narrative shifts. Go, Martha, for getting your badass voice back in the saga of this crazy Watergate Hotel caper that brought down a president, and seems, now, tame in comparison to the catastrophe that is the January 6 Insurrection and its multiple conspiracies and desecration of the U.S. Capitol.
“Gaslit” is an Emmy game-changer.
“Gaslit” premieres on Starz on April 24 with new episodes rolling out weekly.