DROWNING MEN (WHITE HOUSE PLUMBERS)
What is it about Watergate that continues to fascinate us?
Undoubtedly it has a lot to do with the fact that it resulted in the downfall of a US President.
But it seems we have had an insatiable desire to explore the scandal from every possible angle in books, documentaries, plays, TV dramas and feature films.
Watergate has inspired some great movies and television shows over the years.
Alan J Pakula's investigative journalism classic 'All The President's Men' is the apex of the genre.
It's certainly the best known and most adored of all the Watergate films.
However Robert Altman's one man show 'Secret Honor,' Ron Howard's 'Frost/Nixon' and Robbie Pickering's Starz miniseries 'Gaslit,' also did a great job mining the scandal.
Oliver Stone deserved plaudits too for examining the scandal from inside the White House in his 1995 biopic 'Nixon' with Anthony Hopkins.
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Peter Landesman took a very different tack, however, in 2017 - focusing in his uneven movie 'Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down The White House,' on the whistleblower known as "Deep Throat".
Not every screen treatment of the scandal, though, has treated the story seriously.
Dan Hedaya was cast as Nixon in Andrew Fleming's 1999 comedy 'Dick,' which imagined what Watergate might have been like if two teenage girls had been the source of information about the scandal.
Robert Zemeckis 1994 Oscar winning comedy 'Forrest Gump' featured a scene where Tom Hanks' innocent American hero inadvertently stumbled across the burglary of the Democratic Party's HQ, witnessing it from his hotel bedroom and reported it to the authorities.
Fifty one years on, you'd think we'd have reached a point where all possible Watergate angles have been exhausted.
Or have we?
HBO's 'White House Plumbers' believes there is at least one more story to cover and that is from the perspective of the burglars.
That's exactly what Alex Gregory and Peter Huyck set out to do in a five part miniseries - although their tone is more tongue in cheek than most Watergate dramas.
Woody Harrelson and Justin Theroux play E Howard Hunt and G Gordon Liddy who were convicted for their roles in the June 1972 break-in.
Hunt is a former CIA officer tasked with identifying the source of the leaks behind the New York Times' publication of the Pentagon Papers.
Liddy is a White House lawyer brought together with Hunt by Rich Sommer's Transportation Secretary Ergil Keogh to conduct an operation to steal papers belonging to the psychiatrist of the Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg.
Heading to Beverly Hills, the duo scope out the psychiatrist's office and plan their burglary.
Bonding during the visit, they return to the nation's capital where Liddy and his wife, Judy Greer's Fran host Hunt and his wife, Lena Headey's Dorothy for dinner at their home.
Of the two, Liddy is clearly the more unhinged - a fact that becomes obvious during the meal when he insists on blasting a vinyl of an Adolf Hitler speech.
This makes Dorothy extremely wary of him.
Returning to California and now calling themselves the White House Plumbers, the duo hire Alexis Valdes' Felipe De Diego, Tony Plana's Eugenio Martinez and Yul Vazquez's Bernard Barker to carry out the break-in in the psychiatrist's office.
Martinez and Barker will go on to form the nucleus of the team Liddy and Hunt will assemble for their next Nixon re-election campaign mission - breaking into the Democratic Party's headquarters in DC.
In the meantime Keogh has been replaced by Domhnall Gleeson's White House Counsel John Dean as Hunt and Liddy's main point of contact with the Nixon administration.
Adding Kim Coates' Frank Strugis, Nelson Ascencio's Virgilio Gonzalez and Toby Huss' electronics expert James W McCord to their team of burglars, Hunt and Liddy have a number of attempts at infiltrating the Democratic Party's headquarters.
However when the break-in is rumbled, it soon becomes clear Hunt and Liddy are disposable to the Nixon administration as officials try to distance themselves from the raging scandal.
As the pressure mounts on them, will their friendship crack?
Faced with yet another examination of Watergate, Gregory and Huyck and their director Peter Mandel adopt a comedic tone.
Hunt and Liddy are portrayed as macho right wing buffoons.
In fact, it's as if you're watching souped up, conservative versions of Leslie Nielsen's Lieutenant Frank Drebin from 'Police Squad' and 'The Naked Gun'.
Huyck and Gregory's eagerness to strike this different tone is commendable.
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Mandel has form in delivering the kind of comic tone the show aspires to, having been a showrunner on 'Veep'.
However the combination of savage satire and slapstick just doesn't work in this historical context.
In their eagerness to land gags at Hunt and Liddy's expense, the exercise becomes a bit of a chore.
The pace of the show is uneven and the tone is just too sneering.
Gags you expect to be funny just aren't as sharp as you might expect.
As for the two leads, Harrelson outguns Theroux with a performance that tries to inject some dramatic heft into his character.
Theroux's Liddy is just too cartoonish and unhinged.
Gleeson, Sommer, Greer, Valdez, Plana, Vazquez, Coates, Ascensio and Huss have very little to play with.
The same goes for Zoe Levin, Liam James, Tre Ryder and Kieran Shipka as various Hunt children.
Cameos by F Murray Abraham as a judge, Gary Cole as Mark Felt, Corbin Bernsen as Attorney General Richard Kleindeinst, John Carroll Lynch as another Attorney General John Mitchell and Peter Serafinowicz as the conservative commentator William F Buckley Jr come and go.
Kathleen Turner fares a bit better as the lobbyist Dita Beard.
But if there's one standout performance, it is Lena Headey's as Hunt's exasperated and clearly more intelligent wife who should have been destined for much greater things.
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While visually 'White House Plumbers' gets everything right, a lack of spark between the two leads and an uneven script means it never really ignites.
Watergate fanatics will find the buffoonish antics of dodgy disguises and inept burglaries just a bit too much and may well tune out halfway through.
Tired and confused, 'White House Plumbers' makes a compelling case that maybe we all need a lengthy break from TV and film's Watergate obsession and move on to pastures new.
It's time to move on to something fresh.
('White House Plumbers' was broadcast on Sky Atlantic on May 2-30, 2023)
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