“Gaslit,” the upcoming Starz limited series about Martha Mitchell (Julia Roberts), who blew the whistle on her husband John Mitchell (Sean Penn), Richard Nixon’s attorney general, won’t tell the same familiar story about the Watergate scandal, showrunner Robbie Pickering says.

Instead, Pickering’s goal is to “correct the record.”

“I have a 4-and-a-half-year-old daughter and I don’t want her to learn about Watergate in the same way that I learned about it,” Pickering said Wednesday during a Television Critics Association panel. “I want her to know that Martha Mitchell played an instrumental role in it, and she wasn’t just some drunk crazy lady. She was right. She was the first person to publicly blow the whistle on these people. Hopefully, we can correct the record a little bit with this show.”

The infamous break-in at the Watergate hotel is the background, not the focus, of the series, which is based on the first season of the “Slow Burn” podcast.

“We really think of it as a relationship drama as well as a political thriller. Centering it on a lot of women in the period, it’s not just a gimmick,” Pickering said. “One of the books we really relied on for historical reference is ‘Women of Watergate.’ The women in this scandal, women like Gail Magruder, Dorothy Hunt, and, on the other side, Barbara Jordan, they’ve been kind of ignored for the Woodwards and the Bernsteins and the Nixons.”

Executive producer Sam Esmail added: “I think that’s by design that we did not hear...

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