White House Plumbers S1E1 Recap: “The Beverly Hills Burglary” — We Fix Leaks

The following recap contains spoilers for White House Plumbers S1E1, “The Beverly Hills Burglary”  (directed by David Mandel and written by Alex Gregory & Peter Huyck). 

White House Plumbers sets the tone of its goofy drama about Watergate immediately, with the opening card: “The following is based on a true story. No names have been changed to protect the innocent, because nearly everyone was found guilty.” It’s satisfying stuff, made more so by the original “Home Box Office” logo replacing the standard HBO slide. 

We begin on a group of well-dressed men, standing before a building alongside each other with a profound sense of purpose, coordination and operational efficiency. The men carefully breach their target, sneaking inside in the middle of the night, and watch as their lockpick specialist works his magic on the front door of the Democratic National Committee. After a few moments, the man angrily pounds the lock and declares that he’s got the wrong tools. The crew begins to loudly bicker. We’re told that this is the second of four attempts to break into Watergate, which is telling as to how clever and capable these guys actually are. 

A year prior, E. Howard Hunt (Woody Harrelson) works at Mullen & Co. Public Relations after being dumped by the CIA. His wife Dorothy (Lena Headey), named as an active CIA asset by the on-screen text, is struggling, with their two sons, to hold the family together between Hunt’s grumblings about the “radical left” and the traumatic brain injury-induced psychiatric troubles of their daughter Lisa in college. Hunt gets the chance to escape his rut when he receives a call from the White House for a new operation, and is paired up with former FBI agent G. Gordon Liddy. 

Liddy is a very fun character played to perfection by Justin Theroux. Liddy sports a ridiculous mustache (which surprisingly appears to be relatively accurate to the real man) and an air of pompous theatricality. Our introduction to Liddy is him demonstrating to a female staffer how to drive a pencil into another person’s brain through their chin—his intention being to educate the women on self-defense on account of the “spate of rapes” in the area. 

Hunt and Liddy are initially recruited by Egil “Bud” Krogh (Rich Sommer) after the Pentagon Papers incident, and tasked to retrieve psychiatric files for Daniel Ellsberg, who was responsible for the incident and potentially a traitor.

The moment the two men meet, it is clear that each is trying to act as cool as possible for the other. They’ve got a big super-spy job! They’re working in the Executive Office Building, which is technically the White House according to Hunt! The pair’s infallible sense of inflated importance constantly feeds into the comedy of their antics, and gives Harrelson and Theroux plenty of material to exercise their ample chemistry. 

When the FBI refuses to administer polygraphs and Ellsberg’s psychiatrist Dr. Fielding won’t turn over Ellsberg’s file on the grounds of doctor-patient confidentiality, Hunt and Liddy pitch a scheme to Krogh in which they will enter Dr. Fielding’s office and photograph the file. Hunt is very high on the prospect of the CIA providing high-end communication equipment and disguises, but upon arriving at the safe house they are told that all walkies are in use. As far as the disguises, both men are provided with hilariously obvious wigs, obvious false teeth and, for Liddy, a gait adjuster that gives him a goofy and conspicuous limp. This is clearly not the pristine black ops situation Hunt was envisioning. 

While photographing the psychiatrist’s office, the two attempt to “blend in” by pretending they’re tourists. Predictably, this just makes them come across as even more awkward, although Hunt does successfully convince an aloof custodian to let them into the office so Liddy can photograph the file cabinets. They return home triumphant, with Hunt settling into his false persona to the point where he wants Dorothy to call him by his “spy” name during sex. After revealing that he’s only getting paid $100 per day, Dorothy says she though this was supposed to be his “big comeback.” Hunt counters that it is, they just don’t know it yet—another sign of his inflated sense of importance. 

Howard and Dorothy later visit Liddy’s house. While Hunt warns his wife that Liddy can “be a bit much,” neither are prepared for Liddy’s weirdly, almost militaristically cordial children. His wife Fran (Judy Greer) remarks on Liddy’s emphasis on lineage, as Liddy proceeds to play a vinyl consisting of Adolf Hitler’s speeches. What follows is chaos: the house is egged, the Hunts and Fran loudly try to talk over Hitler bellowing, and Liddy takes a gun outside for “a civilized chat and some good old-fashioned arm-twisting.” We don’t see what exactly that involves. Later, Hunt confronts Liddy about the Hitler obsession. Liddy vehemently condemns the Nazis, but professes that his childhood was filled with traumatic bullying that made him afraid to leave the house, and Hitler’s speeches roused him. It’ll be interesting to see how that informs Liddy’s personality in later episodes. 

The pilot culminates in another trip to Dr. Fielding’s Office to retrieve the Ellsberg file. Hunt recruits three Cuban friends to do the job. The result is a hilarious, escalating comedy of errors: Liddy spills scalding coffee on himself in pursuit of the doctor; the purchased walkie talkies don’t work; the door that was supposed to be unlocked is locked; one of the Cubans punches through the glass window to break in, slashing his wrist; the crew accidentally breaks the file cabinet trying to open it; and to cover their tracks, they ransack the office and scatter pills (that they stole from another office down the hall) to make it look like a junkie broke in looking for pills. An exasperated Liddy asks what sort of junkie would break in looking for pills and proceed to scatter their own pills around. Yet, lo and behold, the break-in is determined by the police to be just such a situation. The punchline to this sequence being that it actually worked is magnificent. 

Returning to the EOB, the pair are greeted by White House Counsel John Dean (Domnhall Gleeson), who informs them that they have been fired from their operation, and re-hired to a new operation to re-elect President Nixon. Espionage, sabotage—it’s all on the table for these “men of action.” And they’ve got a blank check to do it. 

Back at the CIA Headquarters, it is revealed that Hunt and Liddy failed to remove the film from the camera they borrowed for the operation before returning it to the agency—the film containing all of the pictures they took of themselves in disguise in Beverly Hills. Somehow the disguises look even more unconvincing in the pictures. I’m curious to see how these gaffes continue to stack up. 

White House Plumbers is starting out as an interesting blend of historical drama and tongue-in-cheek comedy, with a colorful cast of characters that feel like they could easily slot into a Coen Brothers movie. If the show continues on this trajectory of a group of self-important clowns stumbling through one of the biggest scandals in American History, this will be a very compelling time indeed.

White House Plumbers airs on HBO Mondays at 9PM ET.