Some reviewers have claimed this film is redundant, but I don't think I have seen a depiction of the "plumbers" (the White House code for the actual culprits of the Watergate Hotel offices of the 1972 Democratic National Committee break-in) in anything like this detail. But like many miniseries that stretch over many hours, the show experiments with broad changes in style; here we have willy-nilly shifts from family melodrama to broad-stroke satire. I think the series would be stronger if it committed to satire. The actor who seems to get it is Justin Theroux, whose Liddy is close to spot-on as an imitation (one only has to watch interviews with him) but has an added Tabasco-like zing of amplified absurdity that lifts the performance into a larger comment on the history of paranoiac conservatism at that time. Hunt, meanwhile, was a fascinating, flawed figure in reality. Watergate was not the first comedy of errors for this figure with delusions of spy grandeur. His obituary in the New York Times characterizes him as at once "intelligent, erudite, suave" yet was also described by Samuel F. Hart, a retired United States ambassador who first met him in Uruguay in the 1950s, as "totally self-absorbed, totally amoral and a danger to himself and anybody around him." This character is ripe for an understated, slow-burning satire. Instead, we have Woody Harrelson as Hunt, and he transforms the demur, deluded New York State native (and Brown U graduate) into what appears to be a frantic, flustered, renegade Texan (?! Huh?) who often shifts into one of Harrelson's oddest acting clichés: simultaneously clinching and jutting his lower jaw and trying to shout through the resultant mask, like Foghorn Leghorn with a muzzle. This schtick would be dialed back as "too hokey" in a community theater version of this script. "White House Plumbers" is worth seeing for its take on history, and especially for Theorux's great turn as Liddy--he knows how to balance satire and straight documentary styles--but on the whole, the incoherent tonal oscillations between melodrama (especially in the Hunt house) and satire, and Harrelson's unbelievably tense, histrionic rendering of Hunt, utterly unlike the man himself (observe him in the Watergate hearings, e.g.) debase the promise of this take on the Watergate burglary.