Hollywood has spent decades unraveling, romanticizing, and unpacking the political mess that was the Watergate scandal. From All the President’s Men to Frost/Nixon to The Post, we have seemingly seen every angle of this dark chapter in our American history dramatized on screen. Starz's new series Gaslit takes 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.

At the heart of this untold tale of ambitious idiots and over-confident zealots sits Martha Mitchell (Julia Roberts), the wife of Nixon devotee Attorney General John Mitchell (Sean Penn). Despite being a card-carrying Republican, the real Martha was historically the first to publicly condone President Nixon for his involvement in the Watergate scandal, sacrificing relationships with everyone she knew and loved in the name of truth. Gaslight, based on the critically acclaimed first season of the podcast Slow Burn created by Leon Neyfakh, promises the compelling story of Martha, a woman who despite being gaslit by everyone around her, still tries to do what she believes is right. And what’s right is telling the truth. While the show does deliver an emotional, often visceral take on Martha’s torment and psychological unraveling, it also finds itself, much like Nixon’s presidency, overshadowed by the surrounding idiocy.

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Martha lives for the spotlight. More than happy to talk to anyone who’ll listen, she is a socialite from Alabama who has no qualms about getting herself all dolled up on national television to stir the pot. No matter who she’s pissing off — her country club nemesis, her husband, even her husband’s boss President Nixon — Martha is devoted to her fans and relishes her viewers’ attention. When we first meet Martha and John Mitchell, their union is passionate but understandably frayed. John Mitchell is a man caught between serving two true loves, his wife and his President. At a certain point, he must decide who takes precedence. As Martha, Roberts delivers her quintessentially Julia-Roberts-as-romantic-lead performance, constantly charming her way out of trouble with her husband using that megawatt smile and her eye-catching je ne sais quoi. Penn’s John Mitchell, on the other hand, epitomizes everything disgusting about the patriarchy Martha so freely rails against. Penn plays Mitchell’s ruthlessness wrapped in a calm, trusting veneer that truly embodies the rotten ambition poisoning American politics today. And yet, while this marriage, this story of abusive, high-stakes, psychological torment is gripping, we don’t get to spend all that long with it before we’re torn away to watch White House Counsel John Dean (Dan Stevens) and his hired hand G. Gordon Liddy (Shea Whigham) halfwittedly unravel their own lives and with them, an American presidency.

While this show has been billed as the Martha Mitchell story, she’s really only about one-third of the pie. The rest of our time is spent following Dean and Liddy as they get themselves wrapped up in a seemingly unnecessary conspiracy inside Nixon’s campaign to re-elect, which we all know from the history books is doomed from the start. We spend so much of our attention on these fools that at times, Dean even begins to feel like the story’s protagonist — a soft-spoken, naive Nixon idolizer who finds himself wrapped up in a crime he’s never really certain he’s the man to commit. Blinded by ambition and a transparent yearning for validation, Dean’s naïveté hardly deserves as much screen time as it gets.

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If Dean is the ignorant dope whose conscience is desperately vying for attention amidst the deafening screams of his Nixon-ophile people-pleasing tendencies, Liddy is just a straight-up Nazi, a madman misguided by his higher purpose. Very much an angel and demon dynamic on John Mitchell’s shoulder, Dean and Liddy’s plotting becomes the idiocy drowning out Martha Mitchell’s traumatic tale. Told similarly to Veep in that we are watching seeming inept underlings turbo-powered by their own delusional ambitions create messes where there are none, this story feels like polite mayhem. Whereas other Watergate narratives up to this point have had a looming, regimented, devotion to order and justice — often by way of journalistic integrity in all three of the previously aforementioned projects — here that devotion is warped. These men are devoted, but to demons. Misguided by their patriarchal upbringings. Clinging to the same determination and diligence, but guided by a self-serving agenda, or in Liddy’s case, a devotion to obsessively totalitarian ideology. Much like how all the bad actors around Martha are warping her reality such that she disassociates from the truth, so too does the writing of this show flail about, weaving and dodging through extended distractions with these bad actors’ plots and schemes, muddying who this show is truly meant to be about — the woman who persevered through it all.

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Martha is absolutely the most compelling character in this series — a woman desperate for external validation and connection, fueled by a traumatizing past and addictive personality. When we are with Martha, watching her navigate the purpose she feels compelled to carry out guided by her conscious, it’s as if we are watching June in The Handmaid’s Tale. This disgusting world of lawless abandon within the confines of a Republican party, unfortunately not so dissimilar to that which exists today, paints a haunting portrait of what it means to be a woman in America, a woman whose own daughter, Marty Mitchell (Darby Camp) isn’t even always on her side. Watching Martha persevere in this world infected with toxic masculinity is empowering, and at times overwhelmingly painful. But it’s a captivating pain, much more captivating than our time spent victimizing Dean as an ingenue who didn’t know what he was getting into like a fly in a web. Even while all the time with spend with Dean, Liddy, and the other lackeys is clearly intended to frame these bad agents in an unflattering light, the space they’ve manspread themselves in across this narrative, entrenching us in their idiocy and mania, takes away from Martha’s story. Martha feels almost forgotten entirely at times, as we instead watch Dean romance Mo (Betty Gilpin), a liberal he can’t get enough of despite their ideological differences. And yet, perhaps that’s the point. Even in the construction of a show about the female heroine traversing this wicked narrative, that heroine is cast aside so that the boys get their time to shine.

Rating: B

Gaslit premieres April 24 on Starz.