As reported by Deadline, ABC is planning an event series that will take us back to the old days of politics, when the American people had to find out about their leaders doing terrible things thanks to secret recordings and late-night break-ins. Now, politicians (and aspiring politicians) will just get on stage and say terrible stuff while crowds cheer them on. These new guys don’t have any of the elegance and style of someone like Richard Nixon.
Thankfully, he’ll be the subject of ABC’s aforementioned event series. Appropriately titled Watergate, the miniseries will be set in Nixon’s White House “during the Watergate burglary and scandal” and is told through the eyes of White House Counsel John Dean. Deadline says it’s described as “a Faustian cautionary thriller about a man who thinks he’s getting the job of a lifetime,” but it turns out “that he’s being set up to be the fall guy for the most powerful man in the country.” The series will be based on Dean’s book The Nixon Defense: What He Knew And When He Knew It, so Dean himself will probably come out looking pretty good.