With Julia Roberts, Sean Penn, Dan Stevens, and Betty Gilpin, GASLIT Lights a Fire Under Two Marriages Engulfed By Watergate

By BILL HARRIS Special to The Lede In the first episode of GASLIT, United States Attorney General John Mitchell, played by Sean Penn, makes an angry plea to his wife Martha, played by Julia Roberts. “The election is in eight (bleeping) months, Martha,” he says. “If you can just keep your mouth shut for eight months, we’ll be fine.” “Get another wife if you want a silent one,” Martha snaps back. And this tense exchange takes place before the break-in at the Watergate Hotel even happens! Debuting Sunday, April 24 on STARZ, GASLIT focuses on the previously untold stories and forgotten characters of the Watergate scandal in the early 1970s, which led to the resignation of U.S. President Richard Nixon. At the centre of the tale is Martha Mitchell, a big personality with a big mouth who – despite her fame, her party affiliation, and her hardcore right-wing ideals – becomes the unlikely individual who first sounds the alarm about Nixon’s direct involvement. “I don’t know if back then many people knew who John Mitchell was – Martha Mitchell was a huge celebrity,” said GASLIT showrunner and executive producer Robbie Pickering during a virtual panel interview. “But I think we’re all more interested in them as human beings, and not political animals. In a weird way what’s comforting watching the series is seeing the humanity in all these people, and knowing that it wasn’t some special place in time, that is just so idiosyncratic, and it’ll never happen again. You can really see us in it.” In a wider sense, GASLIT follows two couples: the Mitchells, and White House counsel John Dean, played by Dan Stevens (DOWNTON ABBEY), and his wife Mo, played by Betty Gilpin (GLOW). “Our mantra was kind of, we’re not making a show about the background of Watergate, but we’re really making a show about two marriages, and how complicity either destroys or binds relationships together,” Pickering said. “In the case of John Dean and Mo Dean, it really bonded them. I mean, they’re married to this day. And in the case of John Mitchell and Martha Mitchell, it really split them apart, and wrecked a really beautiful love between them.” Gilpin said she appreciates the deft touch with which GASLIT focuses on some of the important female narratives related to Watergate, since many of those voices were shouted down at the time. “But it’s not a girl-boss, overcorrect, history rewrite,” Gilpin said. “I mean, I think that we keep the reality of the grey area for Mo and Martha. I don’t like it when, all of a sudden, the overcorrect is to just give the women all the answers, where we used to have no answers. They’re still real women in 1972, struggling with the obstacles that women of the time dealt with. And I think that’s also why we don’t hear about it, because even the heroes of the story were racist, and sexist, and marginalizing the people whose stories should be told.” Pickering believes that Martha Mitchell, who died in 1976 at only 57 years old, should ultimately be remembered as more of a hero in this saga than she has been to this point, even though her legacy is complicated. “She was a total conservative cheerleader, and a segregationist, and all that stuff, and I have always been fascinated by conservative women like that,” Pickering said. “I’ve always written about them, because it’s like, you want to root for them, because a woman in this movement is kind of ‘punk rock.’ But also, it’s like, uh, you’re ‘punk rock’ for horrible things. And there’s the duality of Martha having that turned against her, so it just hasn’t been clear-cut that she’s heroic. You know, a lot of it was, she was doing it because she was jealous of the hold Nixon had over her husband, which is kind of a selfish motivation. But that’s the way heroes are made, I think, and a really realistic portrayal of one.” billharristv@gmail.com @billharris_tv