How ‘Gaslit’ Aims to ‘Correct the Record’ About Forgotten Watergate Whistleblower

“I don’t think it’s a mistake that the woman who played an instrumental role in this scandal was ignored and silenced,” showrunner Robbie Pickering says

Julia Roberts in Gaslit and Martha Mitchell (Credit: Starz and Getty Images)
Starz and Getty Images

“Gaslit,” the upcoming Starz limited series about Martha Mitchell (Julia Roberts), who blew the whistle on her husband John Mitchell (Sean Penn), Richard Nixon’s attorney general, won’t tell the same familiar story about the Watergate scandal, showrunner Robbie Pickering says.

Instead, Pickering’s goal is to “correct the record.”

“I have a 4-and-a-half-year-old daughter and I don’t want her to learn about Watergate in the same way that I learned about it,” Pickering said Wednesday during a Television Critics Association panel. “I want her to know that Martha Mitchell played an instrumental role in it, and she wasn’t just some drunk crazy lady. She was right. She was the first person to publicly blow the whistle on these people. Hopefully, we can correct the record a little bit with this show.”

The infamous break-in at the Watergate hotel is the background, not the focus, of the series, which is based on the first season of the “Slow Burn” podcast.

“We really think of it as a relationship drama as well as a political thriller. Centering it on a lot of women in the period, it’s not just a gimmick,” Pickering said. “One of the books we really relied on for historical reference is ‘Women of Watergate.’ The women in this scandal, women like Gail Magruder, Dorothy Hunt, and, on the other side, Barbara Jordan, they’ve been kind of ignored for the Woodwards and the Bernsteins and the Nixons.”

Executive producer Sam Esmail added: “I think that’s by design that we did not hear about these women. I grew up hugely fascinated with the Watergate scandal. ‘All of the President’s Men’ was one of my favorite movies, but I don’t think it’s a mistake that the woman who played an instrumental role in this scandal was ignored and silenced.”

Besides Martha and John Mitchell, the series revolves around John Dean, Nixon’s White House counsel (played by Dan Stevens), and his wife Maureen “Mo” Dean (Betty Gilpin).

“We’re really making a show about two marriages and how complicity either destroys or binds relationships together. In the case of John Dean and Mo Dean, it really bonded them together, they’re married to this day. In the case of John Mitchell and Martha Mitchell it split them apart and wrecked a beautiful love between them,” Pickering elaborated.

“[It’s] a bunch of [guys] who think they’re in ‘The Godfather’ or ‘All the President’s Men,’ while Martha Mitchell and Mo Dean are like, ‘You’re a fart joke, bud,’” Gilpin said.

Gilpin added that although the series focuses on Martha and Mo, it’s not a “girl boss overcorrect history rewrite,” that romanticizes the women. “I don’t like it when all of a sudden, the overcorrect is to give the women all the answers. They’re really women in 1972 struggling with the obstacles that women of the time dealt with. That’s why we don’t hear about it because even the ‘heroes’ of the story were racist and sexist and marginalizing the people whose stories should be told.”

Pickering added: “Martha was like every Fox News personality rolled into one. She was a conservative cheerleader and a segregationist. I have always been fascinated with conservative women like that. You want to root for them because a woman in this movement is kind of punk rock, but also it’s like, ‘Eh you’re punk rock for horrible things.’” 

The eight-episode series also stars Shea Whigham (“Perry Mason”) as G. Gordon Liddy.

It premieres on Starz on Sunday, April 24 at 9 p.m.

Comments