Review: White House Plumbers

I am conflicted about White House Plumbers. Yes, I enjoyed it immensely. Should I have? It was a little problematic.

It is terrifying to think that the government could be taken down by male frailty, but that's the premise of the show. Liddy and Hunt are overgrown adolescents driven by vanity, so starved for praise at work they concoct the scheme to bug the DNC. They try again and again out of self-delusion and arrogance until they get caught. 

At some point I wondered, "What would I think if the genders were reversed and these characters were women reduced to caricatures, satirized?" Nope. Would not like, would not recommend. 

Perhaps this past summer's libido nonsense has made me more sympathetic to men. Dunno. And maybe there's a little discomfort with mining the long national nightmare for comedy, like with The Producers. But how can fifty years can be "Too Soon"?

Oh, if you do watch it (HBO), be sure to read the end cards that flip by on the last two episodes.

Comments

[KC]

I feel like Jan. 6 made "our government can be destroyed by ego" jokes not funny again; I bet that specific type of thing would have been more funny in, say, 2014 or so.

That said, I haven't seen the show. But also I agree that it's not great to caricature people in a reductionist manner, male or female, although if a show has non-caricature men *and* a couple of caricature men, then it probably gets closer to the real world where we do in fact have some really spectacular never-grew-out-of-adolescence caricatures running around loose. (I mean. There are some female members of the House I would object to on principle if they were fictitious as an unfair caricature of women, if in a work of fiction where they were the only women, and yet they exist [although to what degree they're performing something vs. actually that way: slightly unclear]. Ditto for Some Men.)

[theQueen]

KC - I think you are right about Jan 6th.