‘White House Plumbers’ Creators Alex Gregory, Peter Huyck On Revisiting Watergate Through Modern Lens [VIDEO]

The first thing people said when HBO announced its recent limited series White House Plumbers was generally along the lines of “Watergate? Again?”

Well, as the paraphrase goes, you’re doomed to repeat the past if you don’t learn from it.

And thus the Watergate-set White House Plumbers was born.

To be fair, the series avoids retelling other stories previously captured in other films or television series. Here, the limited series focuses squarely on the not-so-dynamic duo of E. Howard Hunt (Woody Harrelson) and G. Gordon Liddy (Justin Theroux) as they build a team to break into the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Washington, D.C., Watergate Office Building. The series explores the events leading up to and following the break-in, including Hunt and Liddy’s incarceration for their crimes.

The resume of series creators and writers Alex Gregory and Peter Huyck (both hailing from Veep along with WHP director David Mandel) would lead you to believe White House Plumbers exists as an absurdist comedy. While there are definitely moments of absurdism, the series treats the events with a much more serious tone. The team avoided writing direct jokes for the script. Instead, they stuck to the facts as closely as possible and allowed the audience to find their way into the comedy if they chose.

Here, in an interview with Awards Daily, Gregory and Huyck together discuss how they arrived at this new take on the Watergate saga. They elaborate on the balance between comedy and drama within the series and talk about their strategy in establishing scenes for the audience without specific jokes. They also talk about the casting of Harrelson and Theroux and the importance of women within White House Plumbers and the Watergate scandal itself.

Finally, they talk about the legacy of White House Plumbers and what they hope audiences will take away from the limited series.

White House Plumbers streams in its entirety exclusively on Max.