If you’ve been looking for a show to take your mind off of politics, then Gaslit might not be the show for you. Despite covering events that happened fifty years ago, its look at power, gender, manipulation, who gets believed, and who gets dismissed as “crazy” has more than a few parallels to the modern-day.
Gaslit focuses on the lesser-known stories of the Watergate scandal. As Collider’s review of the series puts it, Gaslit provides “a novel, twisted, at times borderline farcical approach to unpacking the scandal, by focusing its storytelling on Nixon’s incompetent, self-serving, and maniacal lackeys, who carried out his will with incredible ineptitude.”
And if that sounds like something you'd be interested in, here are all the details we have so far about Gaslit, including the latest on the cast, crew, release date, and more.
Is There a Trailer for Gaslit?
A teaser trailer for Gaslit was released on February 2, 2022.
Minnie Riperton’s “Les Fleur” plays as Julia Roberts’s increasingly terrified Martha Mitchell tries to share what she knows about the Watergate break-ins. We hear her being told, “a lot of women your age suffer from paranoid episodes” and it becomes painfully clear why this series is called Gaslit. A full trailer was released on March 16, 2022.
This trailer uses Lesley Gore’s iconic “You Don’t Own Me” as it shows Martha Mitchell’s attempts to go public about the corruption in the Nixon administration. Seeing the emotional, medical, and physical abuse she suffers for this is genuinely disturbing.
The trailers also give audiences a chance to see the costuming and makeup used to transform A-list actors and actresses into the heroes and villains of Watergate. Compare Julia Roberts’s Martha to this BBC interview with the real Martha Mitchell.
Where and When Can You Watch Gaslit?
Gaslit premieres on Starz on Sunday, April 24, 2022. You can watch Gaslit using the Starz app or you can tune into the Starz channel on TV at 8:00 pm ET on the premiere date. Gaslit is eight episodes long, with each episode roughly an hour in length. If you don’t currently have a Starz subscription, you can get a free trial of the Starz add-on for Hulu or for Amazon Prime.
What Is Gaslit About?
Gaslit tells the true story of Martha Mitchell, a southern socialite and the wife of Richard Nixon’s Attorney General, John Mitchell. If you’re familiar at all with the Watergate scandal that brought down the Nixon presidency, then you probably know names like Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, but you’ve likely never heard of Martha Mitchell. Gaslit intends to fix that.
A quick refresher if you aren’t familiar with the Watergate Scandal: it refers to the 1972 burglaries of the Democratic National Committee Headquarters in the Watergate Complex. President Richard Nixon and those in his inner circle ordered the burglaries and Nixon was eventually forced to resign when the full extent of his involvement became clear.
Martha Mitchell was one of the first people connected to Nixon to try to speak out after the Watergate burglary. While Martha Mitchell had been a staunch Nixon supporter, even talking her husband into working for Nixon initially, she quickly grew disillusioned by the corruption she saw. When she tried to tell her friend, legendary reporter Helen Thomas, about the connections between the Watergate burglars and the highest levels of the Nixon administration, Mitchell found herself attacked, drugged, and held prisoner. Mitchell's claims, both that she had been sedated and held against her will and that Nixon had been in on the Watergate break-in were initially dismissed as too bizarre to be true, with Martha’s husband John Mitchell taking a lead role in trying to protect Nixon by discrediting Martha and smearing her in the press.
The title, Gaslit, is a reference to “gaslighting,” which is a pattern of convincing someone that their own accurate perceptions of reality are wrong. The term originated with the 1938 play Gas Light, which tells the story of a husband who tries to convince his wife that their house’s gaslights aren’t actually dimming and that she is imagining the sounds she hears coming from the attic. (The husband himself is actually the one behind both the noises and the dimming lights.) The play’s themes clearly resonated with audiences, and in 1944 it was made into a movie starring Ingrid Bergman, Angela Lansbury, and Charles Boyer. The term has become more common in a variety of psychological, pseudo-psychological, and political contexts in the past few years.
Martha Mitchell and her nickname “the mouth of the south” were largely forgotten in the annals of history, until Slate’s Slow Burn podcast did an episode about Martha Mitchell as part of their series on the untold or forgotten stories of Watergate. Mitchell’s role as a modern-day Cassandra resonated with listeners and that podcast eventually became the basis for the new Starz miniseries Gaslit. Collider’s review notes however that “while this show has been billed as the Martha Mitchell story, she’s really only about one-third of the pie.” It notes that White House Council “John Dean even begins to feel like the story’s protagonist… Dean’s naïveté hardly deserves as much screen time as it gets.” Despite concerns that there wasn’t as much focus on Martha Mitchell’s story as anticipated, Collider's Rebecca Landman still gave Gaslit a grade of B.
Martha Mitchell’s abuse at the hands of a husband she had once loved and a system and president she had once trusted and supported offers painful lessons even now, 50 years after the events. And at least one lesson was learned- psychiatrists coined the term “Martha Mitchell Syndrome” to describe when a person is wrongly diagnosed as being delusional because the things they saw or experienced were so shocking that psychiatrists can’t believe they actually happened. Sometimes it turns out, “Martha was right.”
Who Are the Cast and Crew of Gaslit?
Julia Roberts, back after largely taking a break from acting for a few years, is playing Martha Mitchell. After rising to fame in classic romantic comedies like Pretty Woman and My Best Friend’s Wedding, Roberts has more recently been seen in the film Wonder and the TV series Homecoming.
Sean Penn plays John Mitchell, the Attorney General who valued loyalty to his president above loyalty to the law, the truth, or his wife. Over the course of his long acting career, Penn has won two Academy Awards and played historical figures from Harvey Milk in the film Milk to Samuel Bicke/Byck in The Assassination of Richard Nixon.
Actor and comedian Patton Oswalt plays Chuck Colson, Nixon’s Special Counsel. Colson had a reputation as Nixon’s “hatchet man” and eventually spent seven months in jail for defamation and obstruction of justice. It should be fun to see Oswalt play Colson, as it is certainly a change from his work in more comedic roles like Max in Mystery Science 3000 and Principal Durbin in A.P. Bio.
G. Gordon Liddy, the former FBI agent and Nixon campaign operative and leader of the group who broke into the Watergate Complex, is played by Shea Whigham. Whigham played Detective Burke in Joker and played Mitch Decker in the miniseries Waco. He was also in the cult classic film Wristcutters: A Love Story.
Dan Stevens plays John Dean, Nixon’s White House Council who eventually testified against other members of Nixon’s inner circle. Stevens is known for his roles in Downton Abbey and for doing voice work for the animated comedy The Prince. GLOW and Roar actress Betty Gilpin plays John Dean’s wife Mo.
Gaslit is created by Robbie Pickering and directed by Matt Ross. It is based on Slate’s podcast, Slow Burn. Slow Burn, much like This American Life’s podcast Serial, uses each season to focus on a specific topic. Season 1 of the podcast is devoted to the untold and forgotten stories of Watergate. Surprisingly, Gaslit isn’t the first series based on the first season of Slow Burn. Epix adapted the season into a documentary series hosted by Leon Neyfakh, the host of the first two seasons of the Slow Burn podcast.