From the creative minds of Mr. Robot, Sam Esmail and Robbie Pickering, comes a new television series revolving around the Watergate scandal that rocked the American political landscape of the 1972 Presidential Elections. The series, Gaslit, will follow the scandal under the Nixon administration, alongside the whistle-blowers and the Washington Post reporters that would uncover the truth. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the new political drama series will star Julia Roberts, Sean Penn, Armie Hammer, and Joel Edgerton in leading roles. Currently, the show is under the process of securing a network or streaming service home under the supervision of Universal Content Productions and Gaslit’s showrunners, Esmail and Pickering.
Gaslit is an adaptation of a podcast, Slow Burn, which covers the Watergate scandal that comprised a major United States’ election. Roberts (from Erin Brockovich and Amazon’s Homecoming) will play Martha Mitchell, wife of Nixon’s Attorney General John Mitchell. In addition to this A-list talent, Sean Penn (from his Academy-award winning performances in Mystic River and Milk) was announced to play the Attorney General Mitchell throughout the scandal. Supplementing Roberts and Penn, Armie Hammer (from The Social Network and Call Me by Your Name) and Joel Edgerton (from Warrior and The Gift) will respectively star as John Dean, a member of the White House Counsel who struggles with the decision to lie about the scandal, and G. Gordon Liddy, a veteran and former FBI agent in charge of controlling the scandal. While the series has yet to find a home for distribution, the addition of four proven actors has risen interest levels in the televised unrevealed Watergate stories.
Although little has been revealed concerning the exact narrative direction the series will take, Gaslit’s inclusion of a strong cast partnered with experienced producers and showrunners has revitalized interest in a scandal that has been covered in films and television programs for decades. With Pickering and Esmail’s success from USA Network’s Mr. Robot, audiences will be able to imbue themselves in a historical event paired with a talented and renowned main cast.