Opinion | Why Watergate is funny now in ‘White House Plumbers’

Since then, the Nixoniana has continued to pour forth. Most of it, like most political art, flops. There’s nothing worse than preachy, message-laden art (see Oliver Stone’s 1995 biopic, “Nixon”). Compounding the challenge of dramatizing Watergate in particular is the mind-bendingly outré drama of the scandal itself — truly stranger in its essentials than most fiction. Even the most inventive novelist would be hard put to improve upon White House aide Alexander Butterfield’s 1973 revelation of the secret White House taping system; or the satchels of hush money stowed in airport lockers; or an American president declaring, at Disney World, “I am not a crook.”

Comedy provides a way to avoid this trap. Connoisseurs of Nixon movies are all but unanimous in their fondness for “Dick,” a wildly unrealistic goofball satire from 1999 in which two teenage girls get jobs as White House dog walkers and unwittingly help to bring down the president.

Like “Dick,” “White House Plumbers,” a five-part HBO limited series that premiered Monday, depicts Watergate as a comedy of errors. The president’s men bumble and bungle, scarcely appearing to pose a threat to American democracy (even though their actions did). Here we see the sensibility of the “Veep” alumni who created “Plumbers”: writers Alex Gregory and Peter Huyck and director David Mandel. This new series shares not only the wacky and cutting humor of “Veep” but also its premise that in Washington politics, it’s often the grasping mediocrities, not the best and the brightest, who make major decisions and steer the nation’s course.

“White House Plumbers” also borrows from “Dick” the “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead” conceit of recounting a familiar story through the eyes of minor players. “Plumbers” is told from the viewpoint of two middle-tier but key figures in the Watergate saga: E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy. Nixon himself appears rarely, always in actual news clips.

Hired by the White House to run the “Special Investigation Unit” — dubbed the “plumbers” because they stopped leaks — and then dispatched to Nixon’s reelection campaign, Hunt and Liddy were veterans of the CIA and FBI, respectively. They recruited a team of burglars to commit various felonies on Nixon’s behalf. The burglars’ capture by the police during their botched break-in at the Democratic Party headquarters on June 17, 1972, led to the exposure of a welter of illegal Nixonian operations, and eventually to Nixon’s downfall.

Woody Harrelson renders Hunt as a three-dimensional figure, juggling his commitments to his president, country, wife and family. His family consists of a daughter with mental health struggles; a son who has grown alienated from him; and a wife, also a CIA spy, who is on the verge of divorcing him. And if Justin Theroux’s Liddy comes across as something of a risible caricature, it’s only because Liddy also did in real life.

Even so, the series’ decision to focus on the plumbers isn’t quite as original as it purports to be. In 1982, NBC aired a TV adaptation of Liddy’s best-selling memoir, “Will,” which, like “Plumbers,” concludes with Liddy as the hero of the prison yard.

Back then, however, Liddy was widely seen as a lunatic, if not a monster. He effused earnestly about firearms and Adolf Hitler speeches and once seriously schemed to murder columnist Jack Anderson. New York Times critic John J. O’Connor ended his harsh review of the NBC movie by questioning whether any good purpose could be served by its broadcast.

We now have enough distance from Watergate that unlike O’Connor, we can find value in a series that evokes sympathy for the beleaguered Hunt. We might even, at least to a small degree, feel for the deranged Liddy, who, once in prison, uses his legal training to get kosher meals for a Jewish convict and new trials for wrongly convicted Black inmates.

But if Hunt and Liddy no longer seem as unambiguously evil as they once did, it might be for another reason, too.

Since 1974, we have come to pin less blame on Watergate’s screwball cast of assorted underlings, many of whom were adhering to their own warped ideas about patriotism and loyalty, and more blame on the president without whom none of it would have happened.