'White House Plumbers' Review: Woody Harrelson in HBO Watergate Comedy

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• The Beverly Hills Burglary
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• Sources Gave an Update on Hugh Jackman's 'Love Life' After Fans Raised Concerns About His Well-Being
• White House Plumbers Recap: The Watergate Crash
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In the UK, White House Plumbers starts on Tuesday May 30 at 9pm on Sky Atlantic. It's a five-episode series running weekly in the UK every Tuesday at the same time and also available as a box set from that day on Sky Box Sets and NOW. White House Plumbers is on HBO and Sky Atlantic and focuses on the real-life burglary of the Democratic National Committee HQ in the Watergate Hotel in 1972, that led to the downfall of President Nixon. By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice and to receive email correspondence from us. With Hunt and Liddy reeling from the Watergate arrests, Dorothy must take control to protect her family and the Liddys.

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In a story glutted with broad caricatures, Hunt and Liddy are maybe the broadest and perhaps the least inherently sympathetic. “The Writer’s Wife” picks up six months earlier, in the closing moments of episode three. Jim McCord and the Cubans have just been arrested by hippie cops, whose unexpected hippie attire I assumed would be explained this week but appears to have been forgotten.

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For Mitchell, it’s a felony bribery scandal big enough to sink another man’s presidency; for Hunt and Liddy, it’s a golden opportunity if they can figure out how to seize it without making a bigger, blundering mess of things. For his part, Howard continues to emerge as the “brains” of the operation. He thinks of every little detail, yet he thinks of nothing. He rents a banquet hall in the Watergate basement to justify the Plumbers’ presence in the building, but he doesn’t bother to recon the lock they’ll need to pick in order to leave said banquet hall. He recruits the right guys, but they never have the right tools.

The Beverly Hills Burglary

Meanwhile, the person that was supposed to let Liddy and the rest of the group in becomes afraid and flees the scene. Theroux is the funnier of the two leads, mixing delirious line-readings with a physicality out of Tex Avery animation, but he’s less able to latch onto anything that might ground Liddy. As scene-stealing supporting performances, both would probably be Emmy-worthy. As protagonists, they had me seeking a release valve. As “angles” go, approaching the Watergate break-in as the act of a group of disorganized buffoons is the least revelatory imaginable.

Gordon Liddy are tasked with investigating the Pentagon Papers leak, gathering a team of Cubans -- all Bay of Pigs veterans -- to infiltrate whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office. Lisa and Howard Saint John embarrass their parents, first by greeting the Liddys high as kites and then by making a larger, louder scene. The emotionally fragile Lisa is playing indignant (and high) white savior to a Black country-club employee who says he didn’t even hear whatever racist attack from another club member that Lisa is protesting on his behalf. But just when it seems Lisa is persuaded to go home, Howard reignites the scene by forcing her to apologize, which of course ends in her calling the guy a “pig” even more vociferously than she started. Gordon Liddy post-Watergate scandal, including some of his wild endeavors.

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The men are, under no circumstances, to murder any commies. But they are given the go-ahead to bug DNC headquarters and $250,000 to put toward the nefarious scheme. In Scrabble parlance, he’s finally scored his bingo. He shared these and other candid anecdotes in one of his first major projects out of prison, a 1980 autobiography titled Will that sold more than one million copies and was adapted into a 1982 made-for-TV movie starring Robert Conrad.

White House Plumbers Recap: The Watergate Crash

And sometimes, just sometimes, you have to let your girl play a proper noun. But Howard, it seems, is only willing to compromise his strict code of ethics when it comes to electoral politics. And so the warm scene of family togetherness ends with Lisa upending the board and screaming. And they come up with a playbook so simple that it actually works. No, they don’t kill Dita (though Hunt would later attest that Liddy was “forever volunteering to rub people out”).

Who is Frank Wills?

‘White House Plumbers’ Episode 3 Recap & Ending, Explained: What Happened During The 4th Break-In? - imdb

‘White House Plumbers’ Episode 3 Recap & Ending, Explained: What Happened During The 4th Break-In?.

Posted: Wed, 21 Jun 2023 02:37:03 GMT [source]

When he isn’t writing dreadful spy novels under a pseudonym, Hunt is stuck in a dead-end PR job after getting forced out of the CIA. He goes home to wife Dorothy (Lena Headey), who has a more decorated espionage past of her own, and an assortment of screwed up kids. An FBI wash-out, Liddy has a reputation for eccentricity and an unnervingly chipper, well-behaved family fronted by wife Fran (Judy Greer). The two men are brought together by Bud Krogh (Rich Sommer) and tasked with investigating the leak of the Pentagon Papers. Their conversation is set to somber music, but it’s not actually sad.

Almost predictably, it has caused some contention between her and St. John and Lisa. Her father doesn’t help the matter by openly praising her in front of the other two and criticizing them. The struggle for tonal traction is the main challenge to HBO’s upcoming five-part series White House Plumbers, written by Alex Gregory and Peter Huyck and directed by David Mandel. Gordon Liddy (Justin Theroux), Gregory and Huyck have given themselves possibly the toughest point-of-entry figures in this entire saga.

And for the sake of conversation, McCord offers up under absolutely zero duress that these days he’s collecting a paycheck from the Committee to Reelect the Prez. On the other hand, Liddy is exquisitely deranged and/or frighteningly equanimous when he clicks on a bedroom lamp and lets Fran know he may soon be heading to prison. The next morning, he tracks down acting AG Richard Kleindienst — by this point, John Mitchell’s resigned to focus on Nixon’s reelection — and pressures him to somehow spring McCord, who is arrested carrying a fake ID, from lockup. Alas, it’s already too late to avoid an association between the Watergate arrests and the White House. This five-episode limited series tells the story of how President Richard Nixon's own political saboteurs and Watergate masterminds, E. Gordon Liddy (Justin Theroux), accidentally toppled the presidency.

Instead, they persuade Dita — a rock-ribbed Republican with a history of angina — to simulate a medical episode on the eve of her Senate testimony. They arrange for her to be airlifted to a Denver hospital staffed by doctors friendly to the president’s cause. Eventually, Ted Kennedy and the rest of the committee will fly to Colorado, bringing even more publicity to the delayed inquisition.

He would parlay his role in the scandal for a brief bit of fame, including starring as himself in the Oscar-winning movie All the President's Men about the Watergate scandal. Unfortunately, his brief time in the sun would not last, and he would struggle for the rest of his life before dying at the age of 52 in 2000. Britannica, meanwhile, notes there was a failed attempt to break into McGovern's campaign headquarters, but there is no reference that this was paired with a fourth attempt to get into the DNC offices at the Watergate. But how much of what was shown in the episode was fact and how much was fiction? We're breaking that down right here, including the number of times the burglars got into the Watergate and the role that Frank Wills played in their arrest.

The overall effect of the unnecessary tagging — despite the ASMR satisfaction of the typewriter punches that accompany it — is chaos. Surely one of the hallmarks of a successful TV show is the ability to convey a sense of time and place and character without me having to jot it all down in my Ghostwriter notebook. For the previous break-in attempts, McCord posed as a Watergate delivery man during the day and taped open a back door for his team of crackpot intelligencers to utilize later. But on this day, a security guard called Frank Wills — who, fun fact, plays himself in All the President’s Men — noticed and removed the masking tape.

Attempt number two saw them get into the Watergate, but unable to get into the DNC because their locksmith did not have the right tools. The third attempt, however, saw a successful break-in, but there was just one problem — the bugs they planted did not work. So, despite initial protests from Hunt, they decide to break in for a fourth time. By the end of White House Plumbers, I’d begun to look forward, trying to figure out who the next Watergate series should be built around. The answer, if anybody is curious, is the small cadre of Cubans arrested in the break-in. Find a Cuban-American writer with an interest in understanding their story and find some angle better than “bumbling buffoons.” I’m all set there.