Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Gaslit’ On Starz, Where Julia Roberts And Sean Penn Star In A Wild Retelling Of The Watergate Scandal

When you have Julia Roberts and Sean Penn starring in a premium-cable limited series, it’s an epic event. Now layer that onto the fact that they’re playing John and Martha Mitchell, two key players on opposite sides of the Watergate scandal, then the anticipation gets even higher. Can the limited series Gaslit live up to its high-profile stars and topic?

GASLIT: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A closeup of a man’s closed eyes lit by candlelight. He opens them, and says, “Let me be clear. To grasp man’s struggle for power, we must begin in the prehistoric sea.” The camera pans back as he makes his speech, and the unmistakable mustache tells us that it’s G. Gordon Liddy (Shea Whigham), holding his hand over a candle’s flame to prove his manhood.

The Gist: January, 1972. As we see Martha Mitchell (Julia Roberts), wife of Attorney General John Mitchell (Sean Penn) on TV, John Dean (Dan Stevens) is getting dressed after a night of fun with a very naked partner. He speeds in his Porsche to a meeting with Mitchell and Jeb Magruder (Hamish Linklater). President Nixon is looking to set up an intelligence-gathering apparatus inside the Committee to Re-Elect The President (CREEP), and asked for Dean personally. Dean at first turns him down, but when Mitchell goes to call Nixon, Dean offers up Liddy, a former operative he’s worked with.

Martha Mitchell has become a pop-culture icon that might have even a higher profile than Pat Nixon. During an interview with a Ladies’ Home Journal reporter Winnie McLendon (Allison Tolman), she smiles at the camera and wonders why the First Lady keeps scheduling events at the same time as hers. McLendon tries to ask her serious questions about Vietnam but Martha’s charm defuses that conversation. John Mitchell is ticked that his wife keeps giving solo interviews, but he can’t stay angry with her for too long.

Dean and the super-macho Liddy present a ridiculous and expensive 11-part espionage program to Mitchell and Magruder, who reject it. In the meantime, Dean is taken with a whip-smart flight attendant, Mo Kane (Betty Gilpin), with whom he’s set up via a dating service. After a self-sabotaging first date, he pulls some strings with the FAA to get her flight schedule so he can “run into” her at the airport.

Liddy and Mitchell meet behind Dean’s back and agree to a paired down plan. Martha and John Mitchell exchange slaps over John’s assertion that Martha’s chatterbox tendencies are the reason why the Nixons dislike her, then he makes it up to her by offering to take her to California for some fundraising events.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of?: Because it’s based on the Slow Burn podcast, it’s not a stretch to say that Gaslit is a campy retelling of the Martha Mitchell episode of the Epix docuseries version of Slow Burn.

Our Take: Not only does Gaslit have a phalanx of big-name stars in its cast, but it also boasts Roberts and Sam Esmail among its executive producers. Created by Robbie Pickering (who worked with Esmail on Mr. Robot) and directed by Matt Ross (who played Gavin Newsom in Silicon Valley), the overall take they decided to make with Martha Mitchell’s piece of the Watergate story is to make all of the characters into silly cartoon versions of their real life selves.

That’s a valid choice, of course; it’s a way to point out how a deeply paranoid president got taken down by the bumbling actions of “plumbers” like Liddy, who thought they were better at being clandestine than they actually were. But by making these characters act more like they’re fictional creations than actual people who existed in real life, Pickering distracts viewers from the actual story he wants to communicate, that Martha Mitchell is one of the unsung heroes of the Watergate scandal, even though it cost her her marriage to John Mitchell and much of the celebrity that being his husband brought with it.

If you know anything about Martha Mitchell, you’ll realize that Roberts more or less plays her straight on. Martha was an admitted chatterbox and attention magnet who would call reporters on the sly to gossip about West Wing doings. John Mitchell knew it, which is why in Episode 2, we’ll likely see him more or less “trap” her in a California hotel room as word of the bungled break-in surfaces. Roberts, as usual, shines in the role, easily communicating the charm that made Martha Mitchell one of the more inexplicable pop culture touchstones of the early 1970s.

And even though Penn is swaddled in fat-face prosthetics to make him look like the ruddy John Mitchell, you see Penn’s alternating impish and volatile acting style often radiating from behind the makeup. Here is where the campiness of Pickering’s script becomes a distraction, as entertaining as Penn’s performance is. While his chemistry with Roberts, especially in their private scenes together, is off the charts, Penn turns the stoic Mitchell in to a silly romantic goof, with mannerisms that remind us of Martin Short’s character Jiminy Glick.

But Mitchell isn’t the only one who gets the campy treatment. Stevens plays Dean, who eventually blew the lid off Nixon’s involvement in the scandal, as simpering and awkward, unable to push back with Mitchell, Magruder or even Liddy. Whigham plays the already-ridiculous Liddy as a near-insane psychopath who is prone to kicking paper towel dispensers off walls in both frustration and celebration.

It just doesn’t feel like the right tone was settled on for this story. Yes, there were many ridiculous figures in the Watergate scandal, and just the idea that Nixon, way ahead in the polls, felt the need to spy on the Democrats in 1972 makes no sense. But there was a way to balance this ridiculousness with coming back to the sober fact that this was the first time that Americans were shown how the governmental sausage was made, which set the country down the path to where we are today. As far as we can see, Gaslit has yet to find that way.

Sex and Skin: Dean’s date is very naked in one of the show’s first scenes.

Parting Shot: Sleeping next to Mo after the first time they had sex, Dean tries to hold his hand over a candle like Liddy did. He immediately snatches it away, showing just how much of a wimp he is, we guess?

Sleeper Star: As much as we don’t think that G. Gordon Liddy needed to be made into any more of a cartoon than he was in real life, Whigham’s performance still generated some of the biggest laughs and entertaining moments from the first episode. Betty Gilipin does her usual great job as Mo Dean, as well.

Most Pilot-y Line: Dean almost blows it with Mo when he says that “You’re just like all your liberal friends; you playact like you want to save the world when all you really want is to find a guy with enough bread to pick up the check.” Oof. Was John Dean really that clueless? And did he really use the oh-so-’70s slang term “bread” in everyday speech?

Our Call: STREAM IT, but only for the performances of Roberts, Penn and the rest of the cast of Gaslit. The series leans too hard on the farcical to help viewers come away with any real information about the Republican side of the Watergate scandal.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.