Starz's Gaslit provides a surprisingly engrossing counter to the established Woodward & Bernstein Watergate narrative by mostly ignoring it

Vulture

"Gone is the rhythm of Woodward and Bernstein’s reporting in All the President’s Men, their knocking on doors that get slammed in their faces, their calling the White House and hearing different versions of the same encounter, their squabbling over word choice and sparring with their editors," says Roxana Hadadi of the eight-part Watergate limited series starring Sean Penn and Julia Roberts from creator Robbie Pickering. "In its place, Gaslit centers the people who were punished by Nixon for refusing to acquiesce to his increasingly paranoid demands, and who have been mostly expunged from the commonly accepted version of events in the decades since. When the series, which premieres April 24, succeeds at that reframing, it’s a taut, stylishly shot thriller that finds horror in unblinking submission, groupthink, and the sexist dynamics too easily reinforced by the mainstream media’s coverage of outspoken female figures."

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• Gaslit is a disappointment on every level: "At a media event last month, (Dan) Stevens said that Gaslit means to tell the 'human stories' behind Watergate," says Inkoo Kang. "In nearly every aspect of that attempt, it fails. With Martha as the lone exception, the characters are cardboard cutouts or cartoon villains. (Two marriages form the emotional crux of the show, but I couldn’t tell you why either couple ever got together.) The series has been described as a political thriller, but it’s got so much flab and filler that it seems ideologically opposed to the very idea of suspense. Whenever Martha’s not onscreen, it’s closer to a black comedy — the men behind the plot portrayed as bumbling, delusional fools — except it’s flailingly unfunny."
• Julia Roberts delivers her best performance in years: "From a distance Gaslit looks like a Watergate farce, a tongue-in-cheek take on the scandal of the century," says Chris Vognar. "Think again, or better yet, watch for yourself. The Watergate conspirators were bumbling enough without the benefit of easy comedy. What this Starz limited series delivers instead is a remarkably human portrait of hubris and truly banal evil, with an unlikely heroine at its core. That would be Martha Mitchell, wife of Attorney General John Mitchell, played by Julia Roberts with a mix of pathos and charm. A heavy-drinking media darling and cheerleader for the Nixon White House, she comes to know too much about the cause of the administration’s stench. She’s held against her will and drugged by the president’s men, including her husband, played by a prosthetics-layered Sean Penn as a glad-handing, domineering slug. This is the best work Roberts has done in several years. As we see Martha at her best, then watch as her spark is extinguished, Roberts reminds us she’s not just a movie star. She’s also a top-tier actress."
• Gaslit manages to nimbly sidestep the pitfalls that so many TV docudramas fall into, finding a weird, funny angle that helps it stand out from the pack: "Gaslit hails from Mr. Robot writer Robbie Pickering, with Sam Esmail also on board as an executive producer, and it combines that show’s cerebral, oddball vibe with a dash of Veep‘s foul-mouthed cynicism," says Dave Nemetz. "It’s proudly bizarre, and it wisely avoids the stagnant history lessons doled out by inferior docudramas like Showtime’s The First Lady. It tells a story, first and foremost, where people actually talk like human beings and not like wax figures in a museum. It injects goofy humor into the mix, too, like when the Watergate robbers debate the merits of a windbreaker versus a jacket while they’re mid-felony."
• Mr. Robot's influence is all over Gaslit: "It’s moodily lit and scored with ominous strings," says Richard Lawson. "(The composer Mac Quayle wrote the music for both Gaslit and Mr. Robot.) The writing occasionally whips itself up into feverish poetry, characters slipping the limits of their quotidian function to consider the grander dark surrounding them. That happens most often with Liddy, played as a madman extremist by Shea Whigham. His sinister fugues are the most arresting parts of any episode. The work Whigham is doing doesn’t exactly sync up with Roberts’s more measured take on her character, nor with Dan Stevens’s squirmy version of John Dean. Those two exist in a much more linear and literal show than does Whigham, which gives Gaslit a lopsided gait. Sometimes we are stirring around with the feral, atavistic id of American conservatism. Other times, we are simply watching likable stars scramble their way through prickly history. Gaslit never really decides what it wants to be, how abstract it wants to get. It seems content to flop down in the easier middle ground, as an important series about important things."
• It's easy to embrace Gaslit: "Period dramas about major historical moments can often sound like homework," says Ben Travers. "Some feel like it, too, while others over-correct to a disastrous degree. But Gaslit finds a balanced, polished middle-ground. Director Matt Ross (Captain Fantastic) and D.P. Larkin Seiple (Everything, Everywhere, All at Once) keep their cast well-lit, their environments in shadows, and backdrops bathed in black. Their framings are thoughtful without stealing focus, the footage lets props, costumes, and period-appropriate lighting convey the time period (rather than pretend you’re watching on an ugly ’70s era TV set), and appropriate attention is paid to Whigham’s crazed eyes and magnificent mustache. His performance, alternating between brazenly rabid and feigning propriety, defines the series, though he’s not alone. Penn slithers inside his bald cap and padded body suit with a physical conviction lacking in so many latex-covered performances."
• Gaslit too often evokes SNL: "The eight-episode Starz drama about the 1972 Watergate scandal and its aftermath starts off so rough that, initially, I wanted to tell my editor that the series—based on the Slow Burn podcast—isn’t worth our time," says Amy Amatangelo. "And yet, there was something that kept me watching. In addition to Penn and Stevens, the series boasts, among others, Julia Roberts as Martha Mitchell and Betty Gilpin as Mo Dean. Could they, I thought to myself, all be wrong? What if the series has something new and different to say about this tumultuous time in American politics? I’m not so sure." Amatangelo adds: "The entire time I watched Gaslit, I ricocheted between thinking it was a thought-provoking series full of memorable performances and that it was a terrible series that too frequently felt like a Saturday Night Live skit. More often than not, though, it felt like the series may be gaslighting me."
• Gaslit tries too many things at once, but Julia Roberts is dazzling: "Rest assured, every time she’s on screen, the Oscar winner is incandescent as Martha Mitchell," says Manuel Betancourt, adding: "As Martha, whether she’s holding court with the press or holding her own against her husband John (Sean Penn, buried under prosthetics), Roberts dazzles. At first seeming like a frilly, fragile wife, Roberts plays her as a canny PR machine of one whose loneliness has made her hyper aware of how she looks to others, only for that to make her all the more comfortable selling an image of herself than any version of the truth."
• Gaslit is a surprisingly fun romp through a dark period of American history that also manages to avoid being too light-hearted: "Ultimately Gaslit is a story that reminds us that life isn't even a little bit fair," says Kelly Lawler. "In the polarization of our current era, it's both fun to laugh at Gaslit and important to remember the lessons of history."
• In keeping Nixon offscreen, Gaslit lets itself off the hook: "The particularities of the way Nixonian paranoia played itself out over the national landscape defy easy comparison, and yet the show makes frequent, flat gestures towards the modern day," says Daniel D'Addario. "The series is based on the Leon Neyfakh-hosted podcast Slow Burn, which attempted to situate the Watergate story for contemporary listeners. Journalism can, perhaps, accomplish this specific goal more elegantly than fiction: Consider one minor character delivering a monologue about how Americans cannot 'live together without a shared understanding of right and wrong.' This is certainly true enough. But it’s also somewhat basic as a takeaway: Watergate being a breaking point for American reality seems like a beginning insight, not the thing toward which we’re building."
• Patton Oswalt, who plays “Nixon’s bulldog” Chuck Colson, thinks his character was more like "Nixon's corgi"
• Shea Whigham says working with Sean Penn must've been like what Al Pacino experienced when working with Marlon Brando on The Godfather: "I mean, he is two-time Oscar-winning, just recently, because he's a master at what he does. And so when you see him at the start... It was pretty transformative," says Whigham. "The main thing with Sean is, when I was a kid, I had Sean's poster on my bedroom wall, of Spicoli (in Fast Times at Ridgemont High) and of (1983’s) Bad Boys." 
• Gaslit's alternative title was "The Martha Mitchell Effect": That is a real psychological term for when a patient's beliefs are dismissed as delusions, but are actually true. "It means basically the same thing as being gaslit," explains creator Robbie Pickering. "And I think (the title) Gaslit reflects the take we have on the show. We want to do this period in a way that feels fresh and new and exciting and fun, and also dark."
• Gaslit creator Robbie Pickering wanted to set the record straight on Martha Mitchell: “You want to scream at these people, ‘She was the first one telling the truth!’" says Pickering. Julia Roberts, who also serves as an executive producer, adds: “I saw All the President’s Men five times — I figured I knew the whole story." Pickering adds that he wanted to avoid the Watergate story that Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward imprinted in our memory via Alan J. Pakula's iconic 1976 film. Nor did he want a repeat of Oliver Stone's 1995 film Nixon. “Oliver Stone and Alan Pakula and people who went through this period make it seem very mythic and distant from ours,” says Pickering. “When you actually read the history, it’s a lot more relatable than that and a lot more silly.”