White House Plumbers TV review — screwball and screw-ups aplenty

Perhaps this is what E Howard Hunt and G Gordon Liddy really wanted. Recognition. Legacy. In White House Plumbers, the two men who oversaw the raid on the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate in 1972 are lifted out of the margins of history and thrust into the centre of a new retelling of a seminal moment in 20th-century politics. Unfortunately for them, they are not immortalised as proud patriots but as bumbling fools who helped bring down the presidency they were trying to preserve. 

The five-part HBO original mini-series serves as a monument to the idiocy, incompetence and immorality of both Hunt, Liddy and the Nixon administration which hired them. It’s built on solid foundations — an enduringly fascinating scandal, a fine cast and, in former Veep showrunner David Mandel, a director well-versed in DC disgrace and corruption. Yet the more one looks, the more unsound, inconsistent and oversized it appears to be.

It starts out as a rollicking, almost screwball-esque farce. At its heart is the folie à deux that grows between Hunt and Liddy, two former intelligence agents who believe it’s them “against the entire radical left”. In their capacity as “White House Plumbers” — so called because they fix leaks and handle the president’s, um, mess — they excitedly conduct off-the-record acts of espionage and sabotage, often donning ludicrous disguises. Despite the fact that they bungle an early mission, their hare-brained plan to break into the DNC (remarkably, perhaps the least outlandish of Liddy’s proposed schemes) is approved.

The show finds fertile ground for comedy in the gulf between how the men see themselves and their inherent absurdity. Liddy, played with requisite hamminess by Justin Theroux, is not an indomitable political disrupter but an unnerving eccentric with big moustache, short fuse and feverish mind. If he’s a cartoonish, Hitler-obsessed arch-villain, then Woody Harrelson’s gruff, jaw-jutting Hunt is more of an arch-conservative. He’s so swept up by “red peril” paranoia that he believes spying on the Democrats is the best way to protect democracy.

Over five episodes, these two walking punchlines grow increasingly tiresome. Eventually you wish you were following the money with Woodward and Bernstein rather than scrambling around with Hunt and Liddy. By the time they’re busted (at around the halfway point), the show has already began to drag and suffer from tonal fluctuations and misfocus. It seems superfluous, for instance, to call out Hunt for being a negligent father given his more obvious failings.

For all the shenanigans and stranger-than-fiction oddities, Plumbers also strives to present itself as a sobering cautionary tale about where blind, unreciprocated devotion and disregard for law and integrity have led the country, both then and now. When Liddy, trying to spin humiliation into a warped victory, says, “If all I’ve done is to undermine the average American’s faith in government, that will pay dividends for the Republican party far into the future,” we know he’s talking about a very recent past.

★★★☆☆

Sky Atlantic, May 30, 9pm. All episodes streaming on NOW from May 30 and available on Max in the US now

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