“When you actually read the history, it’s a lot more relatable than that and a lot more silly.”Īs such, the show’s creative team, which includes Sam Esmail (“Mr. “Oliver Stone and Alan Pakula and people who went through this period make it seem very mythic and distant from ours,” Pickering said. Nor were they interested in one like Oliver Stone’s “Nixon.” Pickering and the show’s director, Matt Ross, weren’t interested in another tale like that. Pakula and based on the book by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, has imprinted the scandal in our collective memory as a hero’s journey waged by dogged reporters. “I saw ‘All the President’s Men’ five times - I figured I knew the whole story,” said Roberts, who is also an executive producer. Roberts acknowledged that she had known few specifics about her character before it was presented to her. The Mitchells, who divorced in 1973, were more tumultuous. The Deans, who remain married, are portrayed as comparatively loving.

Dean (Betty Gilpin and Dan Stevens), the White House counsel whose bombshell Senate testimony implicated the president.

“You want to scream at these people, ‘She was the first one telling the truth!’” Pickering said.Īmid a sea of existing and pending Watergate material - the 50th anniversary of the Watergate break-in is in June - “Gaslit” diverges by focusing an otherwise familiar story on two Beltway marriages: One is the Mitchells’ the other is that of Maureen and John W. When she was mentioned, the authors tended to describe her as John Mitchell’s “drunk wife” or a troubled woman, not as the audacious but tragic figure that she was. As he revisited books on Watergate, including those written by some of the scandal’s main players, the dearth of substantive material on Martha was glaring, he said. But it was also a chance, as the show’s creator, to set the record straight on Martha Mitchell. “I’m more interested in how complicity destroys people.”įor Pickering, 42, whose mother’s adoration of Nixon has fueled a lifelong obsession with Watergate, the series scratched a personal itch. “I really didn’t want to make a show that was a Wikipedia rundown of Watergate,” Pickering said.

Gaslit julia roberts