There’s something comfortably distancing about history.
Grainy black and white footage can look impossibly foreign, and even once something’s in color, the more limited options older film stocks worked with to recreate real life have this kind of patina to them in comparison to digital color.
It is easy for a modern audience to use the look of something as an emotional off-ramp — this thing looks different from how the world is now, so it doesn’t apply to us.
But “Gaslit,” Starz’s look into the Watergate scandal (adapted from the first season of the “Slow Burn” podcast), doesn’t want to provide viewers with any escape from how the hubris, incompetence, and immorality of men in power ripple outwards.
This extends to the show’s visuals, which restore immediacy to an event that’s now considered settled history.“We wanted it to feel like what you thought the ’70s felt like,
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