Nixon Allan Grant/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images
The drama, from Entertainment One, is in early development.
ABC is looking to bring Watergate back to the small screen.
The network is in the early stages of developing a limited series exploring Richard Nixon's 1970s White House burglary and subsequent scandal, The Hollywood Reporter has learned.
From Entertainment One and Bob Cooper, the drama will be penned by Jon Maas (The Last Debate) and told through the eyes of John Dean, the then-White House counsel for President Nixon. The potential series takes place during the sexual revolution and is described as a thriller about a man who thinks he's getting the job of a lifetime but discovers the White House's Oval Office to be a snake pit where he's being set up to become the fall guy for the president. The series takes a page from Dean's The Nixon Defense: What He Knew and When He Knew It, published in 2014, as well as Alden Duer Cohen's The Women of Watergate and The System, a treatment by Jason Grote.
Maas will exec produce alongside Cooper's Storyscape Entertainment, Dan Halsted, Eric Hamburg and Jeff Field.
The Watergate event series comes as true crime tales have become increasingly popular on the small screen following the success of podcast Serial as well as HBO's The Jinx and Netflix's Making a Murderer.
Should ABC's Watergate move to series, it would become the latest take on the political scandal.
TV Development ABC
