“Watergate was Wrong. Martha was Right…”

– Gaslit

American politics getting you down lately? Are the state of things reminding you of a time gone by? Are you watching the news and reading your social media feed and feeling like American politics is feeling a little Watergate-y lately? No worries, there’s a show for that! Turn off the news and watch Gaslit from STARZ!

Gaslit is a 2022 American political thriller television limited series created by Robbie Pickering for STARZ. It is based on the first season of the Slate podcast Slow Burn by Leon Neyfakh. It starred Julia Roberts, Sean Penn, Dan Stevens, Betty Gilpin, Shea Whigham, and Darby Camp. It premiered on STARZ on April 24, 2022, and was comprised of 8 episodes that began in 1972 and followed the story of the Watergate scandal through the lives of several individuals involved in the Nixon Presidency era scandal. The main protagonist of the limited series was Martha Mitchell, known as “The Mouth from the South” due to her propensity to attract the attention of the press by talking with them and often at the most inopportune times for her husband, Nixon’s Attorney General, John N. Mitchell. Being aware that her behavior made her unpopular with the government and her own husband, and seen as a liability by both, Martha eventually blows the whistle on Nixon’s and his staffer’s knowledge of the activities surrounding the Watergate Scandal.

The other perspectives in the limited series surrounding the events of the Watergate scandal come from the bungled burglary’s coordinator, unstable mentally and radicalized Nazi sympathizer, G. Gordon Liddy, who on June 17, 1972, led a gang of ex-FBI agents and Cuban exiles into the Democratic National Committee headquarters located at the Watergate Office Building in Washington, D.C. to try to wiretap the headquarters for the Nixon campaign for re-election. He is responsible for presenting the Nixon administration at the White House with this grand plan for the wholesale infiltration of the Democratic Party. The other perspective comes from that of Nixon’s White House Junior Counsel, John Dean, who is at first pleased to be chosen personally by the President of the United States for his position, but soon becomes apprehensive and unnerved by the administration’s involvement in criminality right up to the point that he realizes he is being set up as a fall guy.

Gaslit is the Featured TV Blog for October, and you can read all about the limited series and all 8 episodes in my Critique, then you can head over to my Recommendation and read all about the political scandal at the center of the series, the Watergate break-in and cover up by the Nixon Presidency, better known as the “Watergate scandal”. Then if you head over to my Review, you can learn all about the scandal’s whistleblower, Martha Mitchell, who’s husband, John N. Mitchell, was Richard Nixon’s Attorney General. She blows the whistle and exposes the Nixon campaign and the staffer who had knowledge of the break-in, and as they say, the rest is history. There is also a Good Morning America Interview with leading stars of the limited series who play the Mitchell’s, Julia Roberts and Sean Penn. And after all that, you can head over to my Top Ten List and read “My Top Ten Political TV Shows”.

Before you head over to read all of that and if your considering watching the limited series and political thriller, Gaslit, you can watch the Official Trailer below and solidify a night spent with Julia Roberts as Martha Mitchell and all things Watergate-y!