I love politics, especially biographies of political figures. Through these individuals, politics becomes less abstract, and you really get into the details of events of the time period and how the motivations of these figures shaped big events. So with that, Gaslit was always going to be something about which I was going to be curious. I guessed it would scratch the massive itch I have for political stories. Gaslit started thanks to my political interests, but it quickly evolved into something far more than that.
What is so impressive about this show is that it covers so many details about the Watergate scandal and its fallout that aren’t talked about as much, avoiding Nixon almost entirely. We focus on Attorney General John Mitchell (Sean Penn) and his wife Martha (Julia Roberts), White House Counsel John Dean (Dan Stevens) and his future wife Mo (Betty Gilpin), and Watergate burglar mastermind G. Gordon Liddy (Shea Whigham).
This has been promoted in most media as the Martha Mitchell story, and Julia Roberts definitely has the most screen time and uses every minute she gets. She is half of a power couple that we see working Governor Reagan’s staffers to get them in line with Nixon, reigning as a queen at her parties, but also an alcoholic and serial liar about her past to make herself seem that she came from a better place and that she was a better mother than she was. Roberts captures the full scope of this complex woman who, while her own worst enemy in many cases, has also been hurt by Nixon and her husband in terrible ways, best to be seen to get the full scope. She struggles to convince people of what she went through, being extremely charismatic yet at the same time falling apart from addiction and an unsupportive-to-downright-abusive husband. It is tragic in how human her whole story is, wanting to be believed but also knowing it is destroying her family, and wanting to hold onto that despite how it will undermine everything she has said. It is a sad and utterly relatable performance.
Sean Penn captures the raw power John Mitchell wielded but shows, like so many other people, he was blinded by that power (plus huge praise to the make-up work to make Penn look like Mitchell). Despite his accomplishments, he is still addicted to the praise and time with Nixon, believing he is special to Nixon when that is obviously not the case. Martha, being the live wire she is, excites him, and yet he cannot control her which leaves him frustrated and causes him to lash out in anger, verbally and physically.
As great as these two are, the supporting cast is where the real standouts are. When first told about forming the infamous White House Plumbers, Dan Stevens as John Dean, an ambitious young lawyer, correctly points out to Mitchell that Nixon is way ahead in the polls and that this is unnecessary and illegal. The minute he hears Nixon wants it, he jumps on board, knowing it is his chance for some kind of acceptance that even he cannot really define. He can go from the smartest guy in the room to someone desperate for any acknowledgement or affection to a complete chauvinist, all within the span of several seconds. Betty Gilpin’s Mo puts Dean in his place with loving words or calling out his BS. She is not the little woman standing by her man. She is dominant in the relationship in the best possible ways, and she is always there with the right word or look to make you miss her when she isn’t on screen. Then G. Gordon Liddy. Oh boy. I heard he was a weird guy, but Whigham takes a man of great conviction with the most insane belief system (that I still cannot figure out) deal with the reality of being given power to do something “great” and being imprisoned for it. His way of dealing with that reality is a spectacle that is hard to define. Still, you cannot look away.
Gaslit boasts not just a great cast, but it also offers an oft-told story relayed in a unique and extremely entertaining way. There is a great deal of honesty about how ridiculous the whole situation was–poorly planned, completely unnecessary–but that these people went along with it simply because the President asked them to do it, all while throwing in some great humor without ever denying that something terrible was done. With our FBI agents realizing that these aren’t criminal masterminds, they are really dumb. Or John Dean complaining that John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson did things like this or worse, and why is he in trouble? His lawyer simply says, “You got caught.” They also touch on things I never thought about like Patrick Walker as Frank Wills, the security guard that foiled the Watergate break-in. This event changed his life but not in a positive way. He wanted to simply get by but became defined by this break-in and used for politics that he didn’t care about. It made me think in ways I didn’t think I would about political scandals and the people peripheral to them.
I genuinely think Gaslit was the best limited series I saw this Emmy season. It is informative about Watergate and provides some great insights about the “smaller” players involved. It is brutal in its commentary, humorous, and tells such an understandable story about the flaws of people persuaded to do terrible things in the name of power. They then rationalize anything even when it is obvious that they will not be rewarded for their loyalty — something that is as true now as it was then.
