White House Plumbers review: Woody Harrelson is terrific company but fails to lift buddy comedy out of Watergate fatigue

In the pantheon of American political calamities of the 20th century, Nixon’s scandal looks increasingly quaint

Every political culture has a scandal that obsesses the generations that follow. For Australians, it might be the democracy-shattering 1975 constitutional crisis. For us Brits, it could be the Profumo affair, with its sultry whiff of sex and espionage, that ended the administration of Harold Macmillan. Those are both strong possibilities, but in America the answer is a mononymous certainty: Watergate. The 1972 burglary of the Democratic National Committee offices in the Watergate building brought down a president but, just as importantly, sparked a thousand dramatisations, from All the President’s Men to Frost/Nixon, and now a lavish HBO comedy-drama airing on Sky Atlantic, White House Plumbers.

The “plumbers” are so called because they “fix leaks”. Not from cisterns or U-bends, but from classified material, like the Pentagon Papers which trickled out to The New York Times in 1971. This is the project that brings together Bay of Pigs veteran E Howard Hunt (Woody Harrelson) and former FBI agent G Gordon Liddy (Justin Theroux) in a collaboration that will ultimately result in the Watergate crisis and the resignation of President Nixon. Together, the two men assemble a crack team of low-level incompetents for their farcical assault on the DNC offices. It is all somewhat like Ocean’s Eleven if, rather than an impenetrable casino vault, the squad were tasked with opening a series of commonplace office doors (albeit with even higher stakes).

White House Plumbers is, in essence, a buddy comedy. The guilt of the Watergate burglars is well established, their characters sufficiently pulverised by decades of American media scrutiny. The trick that the show – created by Alex Gregory and Peter Huyck – plays, is to constantly shift and realign the two men’s personalities. Hunt is a right-wing buffoon (“how did this leftist propaganda end up in my house?” he rages at a copy of Time magazine) and a fantasist (“James Bond is a work of fiction,” he announces solemnly, “I’m the real deal”). But he’s also the more progressive, even-tempered, and rational of the pair. Liddy is superficially competent (he urges Hunt not to reveal state secrets to pretty air stewardesses), a veneer that hides a deeply unhinged nature. He plays records of Hitler’s speeches like jazz at dinner parties, frequently suggests murdering journalists and witnesses (“A dead dog chases no cars,” he observes), and speaks, occasionally, in a foppish faux-British accent.

The excellent cast is rounded out by a smorgasbord of accomplished character actors, like Judy Greer as Liddy’s dippy wife, and Ike Barinholtz as Jeb Magruder, the plumbers’ handler in the White House. Then there’s also Domhnall Gleeson as John Dean, Lena Headey as Dorothy Hunt, Kiernan Shipka, Kathleen Turner, F Murray Abraham and dozens of others in more fleeting roles. You might be wondering why, with a cast list to rival The White Lotus or Big Little Lies, White House Plumbers has arrived under the radar, like a group of Cubans breaking into a commercial office block.

There is, perhaps, a touch of incipient Watergate fatigue, not least because 2022 saw the broadcast of Gaslit, a big-budget serial that touched upon many of the same storylines, and was fronted by Julia Roberts, Sean Penn and Dan Stevens (John Carroll Lynch, whose agent is clearly a history buff, is in both). Gaslit was adapted from Leon Neyfakh’s podcast, Slow Burn, which was also produced as a six-part TV documentary. There are only so many ways to tell the same story: Gregory and Huyck have turned it into an Armando Iannucci inflected political caper, but the bones remain the same. This is the Watergate you know and love.

But Harrelson and Theroux are terrific company, before we begin with the cosmic depth of the starry supporting cast. “I am no joke,” Theroux’s Liddy declares without a hint of irony. “I am deadly serious.” But White House Plumbers is not deadly serious. It is a farce that recognises the Watergate scandal as a political tragedy that has acquired the requisite historical distance to turn it into amiable, if not electric, comedy. It has the same screwball energy as Adam McKay’s Vice, albeit without the 100,000 dead Iraqi civilians. After all, in the pantheon of American political calamities of the past 100 years, Watergate now looks quaint. This lightweight treatment is then, perhaps, an inevitable consequence of the darkening of American political discourse.