John and Mo Fight Watergate

By Frank Rich

John and Mo Fight Watergate Blind Ambition. CBS. In four parts beginning May 20

Last season ABC took its share of heat for Washington: Behind Closed Doors, a fictionalized twelve-hour mini-series about Watergate. ABC played fast and loose with historical facts: all names and most events were altered for the sake of heightening the White House horrors. In a new, eight-hour Watergate series, Blind Ambition, CBS has tried to profit from ABC's dilemma. A docu-drama adapted from John Dean's memoir (among other sources), Blind Ambition recites enough facts to satisfy the most literal and obsessive Watergate buff. Yet scrupulous accuracy does not necessarily make for good drama or even good history. For all its intricate detail, CBS'S show is a less incisive account of the Nixon scandals than its pulpy predecessor. ABC took the audience into the heart of the forest of Watergate; CBS shows us only a numbing succession of trees.

Blind Ambition has good intentions; this mini-series is even more ambitious than its protagonist. By tracing the career of White House Counsel Dean (Martin Sheen), the show can touch on virtually every Watergate headline: the Huston plan, the Saturday Night Massacre, the plumbers' dirty tricks, the Nixon pardon. Unfortunately, Writer Stanley R. Greenberg (Pueblo) retells the story without regard for the niceties of strong character development or well-paced storytelling. In the entire series his only theatrical flourish is the use of a flashback format in the first half. Besides being a TV cliche (especially in nonfiction dramas), the device is counterproductive. Whenever Dean reaches a pause in his reminiscences, the show stops dead the hero and his lawyer (Ed Flanders) can rehash the obvious moral lessons of what has just happened.

Blind Ambition's difficulties do not end there: the show's focus is wrong. Whatever one thinks of John and Mo Dean, it would be hard to argue that they are dynamic personalities. Not even a fine actor like Sheen can make the unflappable hero seem fascinating, especially for eight hours.

The tiresome Mo (Theresa Russell) seems considerably less complex than the title characters of Laverne and Shirley. Nonetheless, Greenberg siphons all of Watergate through this couple, and, worse still, he dramatizes the banalities of their domestic life. John's premarital flings with other women (including a French floozy who seems to have stepped out of Irma La Douce) get more screen time than the Ervin hearings. The Deans' bouts with alcohol are presented with the florid excess of an old Hollywood weeper like /'// Cry Tomorrow.

The story's truly exciting figures (Charles Colson, John Ehrlichman, H.R. Haldeman, Bud Krogh) get such short shrift that it is often hard to tell them apart; they are interchangeable ciphers in a series of look-alike scenes. Pat Nixon (Cathleen Cordell) is a walk-on role, and Martha Mitchell is not even mentioned. The show has a surprisingly in consistent attitude toward the casting of famous faces. Ehrlichman (Graham Jarvis) and John Mitchell (John Randolph) vaguely resemble their real-life counter parts, but many of their White House cronies do not. This indecision extends right up to the stars: Russell has been extensively refurbished to look like Mo, but Sheen has not even bothered to get John's short haircut.

There are some bright nuggets here and there. William Daniels has a hilarious deadpan scene where, as G. Gordon Liddy, he outlines his outrageous schemes to trap '72 Democratic Convention delegates with call girls. As the President, Rip Torn does a gleefully vicious Nixon impersonation, whether he is re-enacting private Oval Office conversations (with bleeps in place of expletives) or declaring to the world that he is "not a crook."

Still, Torn's caricature, deadly as it is, lacks the impact of Jason Robards' scary Chief Executive in Behind Closed Doors. Though Robards made no attempt to imitate Nixon's mannerisms, he probed the man's soul; Torn, mimicking Nixon's actual words and gestures, only manages to re-create the familiar public persona. The difference between the two performances is emblematic of the gap between the two series. In historical dramas, facts can be helpful tools, but it takes art to snare the truth.

--Frank Rich

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.