“Death by Lightning” Dramatizes the Assassination America Forgot
History is littered with examples of the havoc wreaked by politicians’ will to power. No wonder, then, that voters cling to the fantasy of the self-effacing candidate—the kind who demonstrates his worthiness of the office by not wanting it at all. The jaunty and absorbing new miniseries “Death by Lightning” posits that America had the closest thing to such a leader in James Garfield (played by Michael Shannon), an obscure Ohio congressman who nominates someone else for the Presidency at the 1880 Republican National Convention with such stirring oratory that he himself ends up on the ticket. By then, the G.O.P. had predominated since the end of the Civil War, fifteen years prior, and had descended into machine politics. Garfield, an idealistic moralist, happens to catch his colleagues at a time that even the movers and shakers have tired of the corruption. “We’re the party of Lincoln,” one of them says. “We ought to live up to it for once.”
“Death by Lightning,” a four-part limited series now streaming on Netflix, styles itself as “a true story about two men the world forgot”: Garfield, who would become the twentieth President of the United States, and Charles Guiteau (Matthew Macfadyen), his eventual assassin. The show’s creator and writer, Mike Makowsky, sets the action firmly in the post-Reconstruction era: the Civil War casts a long shadow, and Garfield’s chief obstacle in the election is not his Democratic opponent but a cynical operator within his own party whose influence stems from the spoils system. Yet Makowsky’s irony- and anachronism-laced retelling makes the story modern. Characters curse freely (“fuck it”), and Guiteau’s first scene—a parole hearing in which he’s called “a liar and a fraud”—alludes to his stint at the “free-love colony” in Oneida, New York. Guiteau’s disgusted brother-in-law later calls it what it is: “a sex cult.”
Both Garfield and Guiteau hunger for glory, though Garfield is better at hiding it. At the Convention, he makes a show of dissuading his supporters; afterward, he campaigns from the porch of his farmhouse. Guiteau, by contrast, announces his desire for fame. Were he born a century later, he might’ve tried to get on TV or launched a YouTube channel. Instead, consigned to the eighteen-hundreds, he pitches anyone who’ll listen on his grand plans to start a newspaper. Scrabbling for purchase in society, he accosts senators he knows by sight—such as the New York power broker Roscoe Conkling (Shea Whigham), who pulled the strings for Garfield’s predecessor, Ulysses S. Grant, and the Maine lawmaker James Blaine (Bradley Whitford), who loathes all that Conkling represents. But Blaine is a pragmatic operator in his own right, so it’s he who chooses Garfield’s running mate: Conkling’s charming but dim-witted enforcer, Chester A. Arthur (Nick Offerman).
Perhaps fittingly for a show about a bunch of forgotten names, “Death by Lightning” is a delightful showcase for undersung character actors. Makowsky has a sure hand in dramatizing the legislators’ schemes and counterschemes to wrest control of the Party, and thus determine the future of the country. The most satisfying period dramas evoke a bygone era even as they speak to the current moment, and “Death by Lightning” is no exception, recalling another epoch when hollowed-out political parties could be co-opted, for good or for ill, by canny outsiders. A government of the people, by the people, for the people is a noble enterprise, but, as Garfield himself declares, “No great wisdom hasn’t been without a touch of madness.”
Since history itself—or Wikipedia, for viewers who like to Google while they watch—is a spoiler for the series’ denouement, the suspense lies in whether Garfield is the starry-eyed naïf that Conkling and Arthur believe him to be, or whether he has the potential to effect real change. In the early days of his Administration, his would-be appointments are stalled by political rivals, and his days are packed with unproductive meetings with members of the public. Guiteau eventually worms his way into an audience, ostensibly seeking an ambassadorship for his dubious contributions to the campaign but, in reality, requesting a path to greatness. The President made it there, from similarly humble beginnings; why can’t he? The long-awaited encounter is anticlimactic: Garfield demurs, declaring that it is only God who is great. The humility that got him into the Oval Office threatens to oust him from it.
Other relationships are more substantial, and more vividly drawn. The mutually admiring marriage between Garfield and his wife, Lucretia (Betty Gilpin), is defined by her memory of her husband as a college student who paid his tuition by mopping floors; she’s exhausted by his striving but knows that he may well be the man for the job. The complex friendship between Conkling and Arthur is no less engrossing. Each is keenly aware of his reliance on the other—and, when the wildly unqualified Arthur is offered the Vice-Presidency, even he sees that it’s a maneuver designed to pry them apart. Their bond is strained both by the vagaries of politics and by the slow stirring of Arthur’s conscience.
The show has a harder time tracing the arc of Guiteau, a man who, sensing that acclaim won’t be attainable, is happy enough to settle for notoriety. He, too, has a talent for speechifying, and he uses his gift for gab—and a small purloined fortune—to pass as a grandee. He swans about New York and D.C., visiting campaign rallies, senators’ homes, brothels, fancy restaurants, and, finally, a firearms shop. It could be argued that hell hath no fury like a superfan scorned, but, as the recent attempts on Trump’s life have reminded us, assassins are seldom driven by a coherent ideology. Guiteau’s motives are scattershot at best; he variously invokes God, the fate of the nation, and the launch of his beloved newspaper to explain the shooting. The genuine historical mystery makes for a hazy villain. Late in the series, not long before the fateful act, Guiteau breaks into the inaugural ball, only to be identified as an interloper. As guards drag him away, he makes a desperate appeal to Arthur, asking, “Sir, will you tell them who I am?” The two have spent time together, but the politician’s answer still feels true: “I don’t have the slightest fucking idea.” ♦
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Inkoo Kang, a staff writer, has been a television critic for The New Yorker since 2022.
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