CNN —
Setting a high bar for HBO’s upcoming “The White House Plumbers,” “Gaslit” looks at Watergate from the perspectives of several key players, deriving its title from the horrid treatment of Martha Mitchell. Losing a bit of momentum down the stretch thanks in part to its diffused storylines and semi-satirical tone, it’s still an extremely well-cast look at the presidential scandal that made the suffix “gate” part of our lexicon.
President Nixon notably remains an off-camera presence through most of the eight-episode series, which marks Starz’s entry into the crowded realm of attention-grabbing historical dramas. The show comes with a glittering marquee, casting Julia Roberts and an unrecognizable Sean Penn (is there an Emmy for prosthetic jowls?) as Martha and John Mitchell, the latter the dutiful Nixon Attorney General who put loyalty to the president ahead of his wife.
The terrific ensemble also includes Dan Stevens (“Downton Abbey”) as John Dean, portrayed as an ambitious young lawyer swept up in Nixon’s campaign of dirty tricks, who finally asserts himself with help from his eventual wife Mo (“GLOW’s” Betty Gilpin); and Shea Whigham (“Boardwalk Empire”) as messianic soldier G. Gordon Liddy, introduced performing his famous stunt of holding his hand over a flame to demonstrate how tough he is.
It’s Martha, dubbed “the mouth of the South,” who provides the project’s title as well as its heart and soul, and gives Roberts a chance to essentially return to “Steel...
Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma on Monday (April 6, 2026) accused Congress of unleashing a “foreign-influenced misinformation campaign” against him and his wife Riniki Bhuyan Sarma ahead ...