“History is not written by the weak masses – the pissants, the commies, the queers and the women. It is written and rewritten by soldiers bearing the banner of kings.” So explains G. Gordon Liddy (Shea Whigham) in the opening minutes of Starz’s Gaslit. If it weren’t already clear which camp he sees himself in, the camera slowly zooms out to show him holding his open palm over a flame in a useless and sickeningly dramatic display of machismo.
What he doesn’t realize is that the series he’s starring in is actually a tale of these supposedly weak masses and isn’t particularly flattering to “soldiers” like him. Adapted from the Slow Burn podcast by Robbie Pickering, Gaslit aims to shed some light on the untold (or at least lesser-known) stories surrounding the Watergate scandal, which at first glance is a good aim. The problem is that it tries to seemingly tell all of the untold stories of the Watergate scandal at once and slap them together into one uneasily amusing but wildly inconsistent miniseries.
gas lit
The End Result Uneasily amusing but wildly inconsistent.
Somewhere in those eight hour-long episodes, seven of which were sent to critics, there’s probably a pretty good feature film buried. In particular, a pretty good feature film about Martha Mitchell by Julia Roberts, the outspoken wife of Nixon Attorney General John Mitchell (a sentient bunch of prosthetics, I’m told, is Sean Penn). After an agent locks her in a hotel room to prevent her from uncovering the truth about the Watergate burglary, Martha whistles anyway – only to be publicly berated as a paranoid, delusional drunk by Nixon’s staff to discredit her report.
Roberts is stunning in early episodes as Martha, who seems to spend her days sauntering through DC parties as if she owns the room and everyone in it (much to the ire of her husband’s colleagues), and then calls her journalist friends to sharing the hot gossip from said parties (also to the annoyance of her husband’s colleagues). As Martha’s story takes its dark turn, Roberts peels away her thick Southern charm to reveal a more vulnerable side. Their physical and emotional bruises are a testament to the cruelty endured by the president’s acolytes who served him.
Or maybe the film is a black comedy centered around Whigham’s hilarious, frighteningly intense Liddy, surrounded by a rotating cast of spineless, brainless fools like White House Attorney John Dean (Dan Stevens), Chief of Staff HR Haldeman (Nat Faxon), Adjutant Jeb Magruder (Hamish Linklater) and political adviser Charles Colson (Patton Oswalt). The funny thing about their scenes in Gaslit is that they seem to think they’re in a slick spy thriller or a major political drama or, in Liddy’s case, a dark war epic a la Apocalypse Now. Now their cowardice and incompetence feels more like something designed by Armando Ianucci or the Coen brothers.
There might even be a thoughtful little drama about Frank Wills (Patrick Walker), the Watergate security guard who first noticed and reported the burglary and whose life was derailed by the resulting fame. Or the unlikely love story between John Dean and his more charismatic, liberal wife Mo (Betty Gilpin), who freely admits she hated him at first sight.
But it’s not at all clear what all of these narratives are doing as part of the same miniseries, and they suffer from being lumped together. Martha’s harrowing story feels light because Gaslit can’t give her trauma the seriousness and attention it needs – not if it also has to stay light enough to deliver a madcap farce about clumsy political agents. Which in turn is inflated by subplots like John and Mo’s romance, when Gaslit can’t even convincingly explain what these two ever saw in each other, or why we should care in the first place. It doesn’t have time for this when it has all these other storylines that have to happen.
It’s not that nothing works. I gasped at some of Martha’s scariest and saddest moments and cooed at an episode six digression about Frank searching for his lost cat. (Full disclosure: I’m a total cat person.) In and around the White House, the hard-hitting cast elicits giggles from scene to scene, often when they’re not doing much at all — like when Linklater’s Magruder anxiously bats away a butterfly in his front yard and looks the same stupid and pathetic, as judged by the FBI agents (played by Chris Messina and Carlos Valdes). And Gaslit really goes all out with Liddy’s scenes, which in the seventh episode are so out of whack they border on the surreal.
Together, these stories attempt to forge a new understanding of Watergate from the perspective of its unlikely, unsung – well, if not necessarily heroes, then at least the people who helped push it forward. In this version, the supposedly important and powerful white men of the White House take a backseat to Martha the Mouth, a black security guard, a Latino FBI agent, wily political wives like Mo who helped their struggling husbands endure the aftermath of to deal with the scandal.
But the individual parts feel too baggy and unfocused, with too many jarring shifts in tone and too little sense of narrative rhythm to offer much insight at the end. It seems telling that initially I didn’t even know the series was going to be eight episodes long – after seeing the seven that had been sent to me, the seventh felt like as good a place to end as any . It’s a nice idea to take back control of history from these soldiers and put it in the hands of the masses. If nothing else, the series is guaranteed to teach some viewers stories they didn’t know before. It’s just too bad that Gaslit, in its messiness, stops somewhere to live up to them.