‘White House Plumbers’ Review: History Unclogged

metroweekly.com:

White House Plumbers (★★★★☆), HBO’s five-episode limited series, different from previous narratives is the ruthlessness with which it mocks that political espionage team.

Eschewing the historical tendency to portray E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy as having a dark gravitas, creators Alex Gregory and Peter Huyck have wisely opted to manifest them as the clumsiest of clowns.Woody Harrelson (Hunt) and Justin Theroux (Liddy) deliver performances that adroitly highlight the foolishness and absurdity of these infamous political operatives without tipping over into caricatures that would risk undermining the severity of their incompetence.Far too many film and television adaptations of the Watergate scandal over the years have offered ridiculous and undeserved maturity to the actions of the Plumbers, seeming to imply that these were savvy men who simply made a series of unsavvy decisions.This deeply flawed characterization has seemed to abet a degree of public rehabilitation for these complete dork-ass losers in the years after their relatively brief incarceration over Watergate (Hunt served 33 months and Liddy was slapped with 52 months).

I say “relatively brief” because it doesn’t seem the least bit logical that countless citizens charged with non-violent drug crimes spent far longer in prison than these two traitors.Harrelson plays Hunt as a man who doesn’t seem to know his ass from a hole in the ground, despite having considerable experience on paper as a CIA operative and former Naval officer.

That is accurate, and I guaran-damn-tee you any woman or person of color who had made as many unforced errors as Hunt throughout the Watergate saga would have received this dipshit portrayal long ago.Liddy, meanwhile, is.