'White House Plumbers' Review: Woody Harrelson in HBO Watergate Comedy

Table Of Content

• Lifestyle
• White House Plumber G. Gordon Liddy’s Wild Career After the Watergate Scandal
• True Believers
• 'The Office' Sets First Castmembers for Potential Follow-Up Series
• White House Plumbers Recap: Fifth Time’s a Disaster
• Lori Loughlin Speaks Out Following Varsity Blues Scandal: “You Can’t Hang on to Negativity. Life’s Too Short”

This five-part limited series imagines the behind-the-scenes story of how Nixon’s political saboteurs, E. Gordon Liddy (Justin Theroux), accidentally toppled the presidency they were zealously trying to protect… and their families along with it. Chronicling actions on the ground, this satirical drama begins in 1971 when the White House hires Hunt and Liddy, former CIA and FBI, respectively, to investigate the Pentagon Papers leak.

Lifestyle

Judy starred in Two and a Half Men, 13 Going On 30, Ant-Man, and Jurassic World. She’s also due to appear in The First Lady, coming out this year, which tells the story of the presidents’ wives. Hunt, Liddy and the Cubans attempt to break into the DNC offices at the Watergate to plant listening devices for the White House. With his family, Hunt’s “forever volunteering” the worst of parenting instincts. Somehow, despite the Nürnberg Rally that was their first dinner party, the Liddys and the Hunts have continued to socialize outside of work. Howard and Dorothy even invite Gordon and Fran to their country club in Maryland.

Fact vs Fiction: White House Plumbers episode 5 — what happened during the Watergate trials? - What To Watch

Fact vs Fiction: White House Plumbers episode 5 — what happened during the Watergate trials?.

Posted: Mon, 29 May 2023 07:00:00 GMT [source]

White House Plumber G. Gordon Liddy’s Wild Career After the Watergate Scandal

Justin starred in the 2001 movie Mulholland Drive and American Psycho before playing Joe in the series Six Feet Under. He was in the 2006 Miami Vice movie plus the hit film The Girl on The Train. Justin was also in the series Parks and Recreation and last year’s Apple TV+ drama The Mosquito Coast.

True Believers

However, as Liddy and Howard learn from John Dean, only the device they placed in the phone belonging to Lawrence F. O’Brien’s secretary is operational, and there is nothing of value in the transcript they have gotten from that. The series depicts that this is when Howard has to acknowledge that this is yet another failure in his career, just like the Bay of Pigs invasion. Unfortunately, Howard and his locksmith get stuck in a banquet room. They have to spend the night there and urinate in a whiskey bottle (hence the title of the episode).

By the end of an hour, I was exhausted by the hijinks. By the end of two hours, having sat through extended reenactments of each failed Watergate break-in, I was looking for anything resembling a still center to this madcap universe. And by the end of the fourth episode I was actively angry with the glibly cheap laughs that accompanied Dorothy and her real-life fate. Unfortunately, Liddy wants to make sure they both stay broke.

Elsewhere in the building, the locksmith, Virgilio Gonzalez, declares that he has left the correct tools to open the door in front of them in Miami. As part of your account, you’ll receive occasional updates and offers from New York, which you can opt out of anytime. This is, to some extent, a political series, which means that, in homage to Aaron Sorkin, our characters must walk-and-talk down the hallowed corridors of American governance. As Howard gets ushered back into favor, we’re treated to a who’s who of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, the federal office building in which most people who say they work at the White House actually work.

He calls it in and eventually the police arrive, catching McCord and the others in the act of breaking in. There were too many characters in this madcap dramedy and they almost all beggar belief — one outlandish caricature after another — except that they’re all real. It’s a problem that Hollywood has solved by telling the Watergate story over and over again, with the spotlight on a different principal within the burgeoning fiasco each time. There’s Nixon stooge Bud Krogh, a deputy assistant responsible for onboarding Howard, played by Rich Sommer (in real life, Krogh’s memoir was part of the inspiration for this series). Domhnall Gleeson plays White House counsel John Dean.

You’ll remember the second attempt — first attempt No. 2, really — from the White House Plumbers series premiere. The ragtag crew of political criminals makes it up to the DNC offices, but Villo doesn’t have the tools necessary to pick the lock. They’re on the Watergate premises just long enough for McCord to get ID’d by a security guard he used to work with.

He never appreciated her and how it bored her to type up his inane novels, how it enraged her to eat baked ziti with Nazis. On the flight, she tells Michele Clark everything she knows about Watergate, and then she dies. Did she take a stand against corruption and against her husband too late? But that she was finally taking a stand at all proved to be useless. And, in the end, maybe that’s part of what White House Plumbers has to say about what it takes to stop endemic political corruption. A lot more than one woman’s sacrifice or a vengeful tell-all.

And that’s what the rest of the episode is devoted to explaining — how Mitchell could grow desperate enough to take these men up on their bonkers scheming. And how Liddy and Hunt climb their way back from the basement of Mitchell’s estimation to his good graces. This is where Kathleen Turner finally comes into play. We learn — not via chyron, but by its cousin, archival news coverage — that Turner is Dita Beard, a lobbyist for a company called International Telephone and Telegraph. In the episode’s cold open, she was typing up a memo about the time Mitchell promised ITT a favorable outcome in an antitrust lawsuit in exchange for a humongous donation to the RNC convention in San Diego. Now, the memo’s been leaked to newspaper columnist Jack Anderson.

After failing upward, the unlikely pair lands on the Committee to Re-Elect the President, plotting several unbelievable covert ops – including bugging the Democratic National Committee offices at the Watergate complex. Proving that fact is sometimes stranger than fiction, White House Plumbers sheds light on the lesser-known series of events that led to one of the greatest political scandals in American history. Liddy’s notorious plot to spy on the Democratic National Committee, which led to President Richard Nixon’s resignation in August 1974, is satirically featured in the new HBO limited series White House Plumbers. Justin Theroux stars as Liddy, and Woody Harrelson plays his co-conspirator E. The real life Liddy and Hunt were part of a special White House unit, informally known as the Plumbers, whose job was to prevent or respond to leaks of classified information. There were two operations that night, with one team staying to break into the DNC and another attempting to break into Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern's campaign offices.

'White House Plumbers' Recap: Episode 2 - Vulture

'White House Plumbers' Recap: Episode 2.

Posted: Mon, 08 May 2023 07:00:00 GMT [source]

White House Plumbers endeavors to humanize its perpetrators by illustrating that beneath their buffoonery was… lots and lots more buffoonery. The series starts with this imbecility already at maximum volume and then makes it louder and louder. Alex Gregory and Peter Huyck's five-part series argues that the people in charge of the Watergate break-in were, perhaps, slightly buffoonish. The limited series is now available to stream in its entirety. I'm a huge fan of television so I really have found the perfect job, as I've been writing about TV shows, films and interviewing major television, film and sports stars for over 25 years.

Frank Wills' role in the Watergate break-in is pretty accurately portrayed in the show (aside from him meeting Hunt during that first, unconfirmed break-in). On the blog Rediscovering Black History from the National Archives, it says that while on his rounds on June 17, 1972, Wills spotted the tape on a door and removed it. However, when he returned later he saw that tape had been reapplied. This caused him to call the authorities, who then caught and arrested everyone. Other reports, including from the Nixon Library and History.com, mention that there were at least two break-ins — the planting of the failed bugs and the attempt to fix them was when they all were caught. On the second attempt, the entire team goes in together until James W. McCord Jr. (Toby Huss) separates from them and runs into two security guards.

They recon the doctor’s Beverly Hills office in ludicrous yet entirely penetrable disguises. They take photos of themselves on a camera borrowed from the CIA but then forget to take the film out before returning it. About halfway through the first episode of the new HBO miniseries White House Plumbers, G. Gordon Liddy and his wife, Fran — played by Justin Theroux and the impeccably outlandish Judy Greer, respectively — have Gordon’s co-worker E. Howard Hunt (Woody Harrelson) and his wife, Dorothy (Lena Headey), over for dinner. Despite its short number of episodes, White House Plumbers has a lot of history to work with. The Pentagon Papers, Watergate, and of course the aftermath of those historical events.