Julia Roberts can elevate a scene with nothing but the staccato of her whisper or the anxious fondling of an earring. In Starz’s eight-episode limited series Gaslit, she plays Martha Mitchell, the outspoken wife of Richard Nixon’s attorney-general John Mitchell and one of the few characters not immediately recognisable from other Hollywood restagings of this dark moment in US political history.
Roberts’s Martha is an all-purpose gossip – nickname: “The Mouth of the South” – until her husband violently threatens her against telling the press what she knows of the administration’s criminal tactics. Roberts is wrenching as she slides from shrewd to shattered and back again. But while the series takes its du jour title from Martha’s predicament, Gaslit doesn’t confine itself to her story. And not even Roberts’s blistering portrayal of a woman terrorised into silence is enough to save a drama that is somehow both plodding and overreaching.
