Parents' Guide to White House Plumbers

To the American public, the coverup of the Watergate burglary was serious stuff indeed, but as this uproarious series shows us, it was a comic masterpiece of ineptitude. G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt thought they were in on the joke; after all, they gave themselves the name White House Plumbers, hired by Nixon to stop (information) leaks. And in the able comic hands of Justin Theroux and Woody Harrelson, these two are delightful buffoons: botching break-ins, hiring the dumbest of henchmen, taking long minutes during missions to argue about what they should name it. In one inspired sequence, the pair agree they should wear spy disguises for a foray; moments later, Hunt is in an orange fright wig and Liddy has on a jet-black Prince Valiant wig.

In service of Nixon, John Dean (Domhnall Gleeson) says the plumbers' job before the re-election cycle is "espionage, sabotage, infiltration, disinformation, electronic surveillance, recruiting and planting moles, your basic dirty tricks." Instead, their bumbling work took an entire administration down. Those who lived through the era spotlighted in the series and students of history will enjoy White House Plumbers best: There are fast references to such then-current cultural touchstones as Deep Throat, the Grassy Knoll, and the Bay of Pigs that may confuse those not in the know (or those not willing to quickly pause the show to do a quick info search). But as a portrait of a vintage scandal that had a lot of extremely ridiculous people and details attached to it, White House Plumbers is absolutely aces.