HBO Studios

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The HBO limited series The White House Plumbers focuses not on the Oval office nor the exhaustive work of the reports who uncovered and revealed the Watergate scandal that ended Nixon’s presidency but rather on the low=level operatives that burgled and spied for the Committee to Re-Elect The President, with particular attention to the flowering and then dying friendship between the G. Gordon Liddy (Justin Theroux) and E. Howard Hunt (Woody Harrelson).

Plumbers is more their story, their meeting, their close and powerful bond, and their eventual falling out which resulted in decades of stony cold silence between the men. It is four episodes of fairly accurate historical farce as bungling bumbling incompetence generates farce that could only have happened because fiction requires believability and history only required reality followed by a fifth episode of Greek tragedy where hubris and flaws destroy the men and utterly transforms the nation.

In addition to Theroux and Harrelson, both turning in fantastic performances, the series boasts a number of talented and amazing performers, Kathleen Turned coming out of her medical retirement to steal an entire episode, Lena Heady as the only real brains of the operation as Hunt’s spook spouse Dorothy ‘Dot’ Hunt, and Irish actor Domhnall Gleeson as the ever-slippery John Dean.

Paired with a companion podcast that not only interviews the creatives behind the series but also illuminates what was historical and what was dramatic, The White House Plumbers presents an under seen and covered aspect of the scandal that destroyed Nixon’s administration shattered that last fragment of a nation’s trust in its institutions. Well worth the five-episode commitment the series reveals that history can be shaped not only by the bold and the brave but also by the stupid and the fanatical.