Woody Harrelson-Justin Theroux series White House Plumbers revisits the fringes of Watergate

LOS ANGELES – On June 17, 1972, five men were arrested while breaking into the Democratic National Committee offices at the Watergate office building in Washington.

Dismissed by the White House press secretary as a “third-rate burglary”, the break-in set off a chain of events that ultimately led to the resignation of then United States President Richard Nixon in August 1974. Ever since, the “gate” suffix has been shorthand for scandal, and Watergate has provided fodder for movies, books, podcasts, commentaries and television.

But at a time when a former president has been indicted on charges of funnelling hush money payments to an adult-film star, does Watergate still shock? Is it still the riveting tale of malfeasance that it was 51 years ago?

A new five-part miniseries may offer answers to those questions.

White House Plumbers, premiering on HBO Go on Tuesday, recreates the events that riveted a nation and upended American politics, focusing not on the usual characters – no Nixon or Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein on the screen here – but on the men behind the crime.

These are the Plumbers, led by E. Howard Hunt, the former Central Intelligence Agency officer played by Woody Harrelson, and G. Gordon Liddy, the lawyer and former Federal Bureau of Investigation agent played by Justin Theroux.

Hunt and Liddy are well known to historians and Watergate buffs, but they are secondary players in a scandal that toppled a presidency and whose particulars have faded from the popular memory over five decades.

“I was pretty much in the dark about all this stuff,” American actor Harrelson, 61, said. “I didn’t know much about Hunt. I was 11 when this went down.”

Even the Plumbers creators acknowledge that the Watergate offences seem quaint compared with, say, Mr Donald Trump’s effort to overturn an election that he lost by about seven million votes.

“That was an era in which people could still be shocked that this kind of behaviour went on in politics,” said Peter Huyck, who created the show with Alex Gregory. “People were shocked that people were breaking in and planting bugs, whereas nowadays that would seem like small potatoes.”

David Mandel, who directed the series, said he learnt about Watergate when he was growing up from All The President’s Men, the 1974 book and 1976 movie about how Woodward and Bernstein broke the scandal that brought down Nixon.

“I’m sad to say, you probably have a lot of people that have no idea that there was Watergate,” he said.

So why dramatise a small slice of a historical event people no longer seem all that interested in?

“First and foremost, it was a great story with larger-than-life characters and astonishing twists and turns,” Gregory said. “If we’re hoping to achieve anything, it’s to get people interested in history in general by making it entertaining. Perhaps people would learn from history if it were served up as a cheeseburger instead of an undressed arugula salad.”

White House Plumbers is a descendant of another HBO Washington series, the caustic comedy Veep. Huyck and Gregory were mainstays of that satire’s writers room, and Mandel was a showrunner.

But this is no Veep II. White House Plumbers is as sad as it is funny. It is a “slapstick tragedy” in the words of Frank Rich, an executive producer for the show and a former executive producer of Veep.

Indeed, Hunt and Liddy are portrayed as being slightly pathetic, but also sympathetic, if in a bumbling kind of way.

American actor Theroux, 51, said of his role: “I don’t fall in love with his politics or his ethics. I did fall in love with his spirit. I’m conflicted, but I really liked him, liked playing him.”

Hunt is a relatively bland character, particularly compared with Liddy, whom Mandel described as a “nutball”. But Harrelson found himself fascinated by, if not terribly sympathetic to, this shadowy symbol of the Watergate era.

“He’s a deplorable man,” he said. “He just did some cold-blooded stuff back in the day.” NYTIMES

White House Plumbers premieres on HBO Go on Tuesday.