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Jul 26, 2023

White House Plumbers, Sky Atlantic, review: Woody Harrelson and Justin Theroux make a droll farce of Watergate

The Watergate scandal is not exactly new territory for screenwriters. From the

The Watergate scandal is not exactly new territory for screenwriters. From the 1976 classic All the President's Men to, just last year, the excellent Gaslit, the story of the bungled covert operations that led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon in 1974 has been raked over time and time again.

So White House Plumbers, created by Alex Gregory and Peter Huyck – two writers who have previously worked on Veep and David Letterman's 90s Late Show – needed to be pretty good to justify its existence. Thankfully, it was.

The five-episode comedy drama focuses on E Howard Hunt (Woody Harrelson) and G Gordon Liddy (Justin Theroux), ex CIA and FBI agents respectively, who were hired by Nixon's White House to run a dirty tricks unit.

Harrelson's Hunt was a jazz-loving, communist-hating zealot with looming family problems in the shape of a troubled daughter and an unhappy wife. His career had been stalled by the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. Meanwhile, Theroux's Liddy was a luxuriously mustachioed oddball who had a thing for Hitler's speeches and liked to play recordings of them turned up to 11 during dinner parties.

Both Liddy and Hunt were portrayed as incompetent idiots: the Laurel and Hardy of political espionage. Hunt was marginally less deranged than Liddy but it was a close-run competition.

They bickered endlessly over terminology. Was their undercover mission a "black op" or a "black bag job?" Hunt didn't want their organisation to be called the Special Intelligence Unit because "it makes it sound like we’re mentally handicapped". Liddy wanted to call it "Project Odessa" after the secret network that helped SS officers get to South America after the war. He had even had stationery made. "You made stationery for a covert op?" asked Hunt. They eventually settled on The Plumbers. "We fix leaks," he said. Boom tish!

Their first job, and the focus of the first episode, was to try to discredit Daniel Ellsberg who had handed over documents about the Vietnam War to the US press. Our heroes decided the best way to smear Ellsberg would be to photograph his psychiatrist's file. The pair donned deliberately ridiculous disguises when scoping out the therapist's office. The wearing of stupid wigs was a tried and tested CIA technique, claimed Hunt: "classic misdirection".

But eye-watering incompetence need not be a barrier to promotion in the world of politics. By the end of the episode Hunt and Liddy had been tasked with making sure the president won the next election and were given free reign on how to go about it, be that "espionage, sabotage, infiltration, disinformation, electronic surveillance, recruiting and planting moles".

White House Plumbers was drily funny. Harrelson and Theroux had real chemistry and Hunt and Liddy's growing bond in a confederacy of chaos was almost touching. Meanwhile, Lena Headey as Hunt's seemingly normal and increasingly exasperated wife Dorothy served to throw their stupidity into sharp relief.

As we watched the pair delightedly congratulate themselves on their new mission, it was impossible to ignore that it was going to lead to Watergate, a fiasco so monumental that adding "gate" to the end of any word now signifies a huge scandal. It might be a true story told over and over, but some of the incidents here seemed so implausibly daft that at multiple points I had to check to see whether they had actually happened – they usually had.