I’m thrilled to report how much I liked the premiere episode of the new five-part HBO miniseries White House Plumbers. It’s a raucously funny satirical comedy about the way right-wing loons E. Howard Hunt (Woody Harrelson) and G. Gordon Liddy (Justin Theroux) failed upward through the early 1970s to their ultimate peak of insane incompetence, bungling the Watergate break-in in their idiotic attempts to preserve Richard Nixon’s presidency.

Episode One covers Hunt’s destroyed CIA career after his disastrous leadership in the Bay of Pigs fiasco, which he blames on “that pussy JFK.” He’s soon given another chance when he’s teamed with ex-FBI nutter Liddy to find a way to take down Daniel Ellsberg, the Pentagon Papers leaker. They’re given this assignment by Egil ”Bud” Krogh (Richard Sommer), a special advisor to Nixon whose 2007 book, Integrity: Good People, Bad Choices, and Life Lessons From the White House, provides the material for this miniseries. Writers Alex Gregory and Peter Huyck (Veep, The Larry Sanders Show) and director David Mandel (Veep, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Seinfeld) do a scalpel-sharp job of eviscerating the ideologically crazed operators behind Nixon’s most infamous “dirty tricks.”

Hunt and Liddy hatch a berserk plan to break in to the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, Dr Lewis Fielding, and get ahold of Ellsberg’s file so they can leak it and, hopefully, destroy his credibility. Their methods include casing the office while wearing garishly fake wigs, an “old CIA trick,” according to Hunt, because any eyewitnesses will only remember the wigs.