Summary
Death by Lightning has its issues, including a slightly meandering script and tonal inconsistencies, but the performances — especially from Michael Shannon and Matthew Macfadyen — are electrifying enough for the political drama to earn its title.
Today is either the absolute best or the absolute worst time to release a very mainstream miniseries about political violence, so credit is due to Netflix, I suppose, for their willingness to find out one way or the other. In the contentious Death by Lightning, a tonally inconsistent, electrically-acted four-parter from Mike Makowsky, there isn’t an especially clear answer on the subject. Here, assassins and their motives are one component among many in the lumbering political machinery of a nascent republic, bedfellows of overt corruption, garden-variety ineptitude, and lingering intolerance. It is, in other words, not so much a story about political violence and its consequences as it is about politics and politicians in general, suggesting that there are various strains of psychopathy common in statesmanship and that the willingness to murder an elected official is simply one of them.
This is not as straightforward a dramatisation of the assassination of a serving U.S. president as, say, Apple TV+’s rather excellent Manhunt was. It’s based on Candice Millard’s 2011 book Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President, but takes a lot more risks with its script – and certainly its performances – than you’d probably expect. A lot of it is very funny, the actual assassination is hastily rushed through, a compelling argument is made that it wouldn’t have been successful without another form of incompetence, itself rooted in resistance to the march of progress, and ultimately, despite the death of President James Garfield (Michael Shannon; Amsterdam, Bullet Train, Echo Boomers) at the hands of his most ardent supporter, Charles J. Guiteau (Matthew Macfadyen; The Enfield Haunting, Operation Mincemeat, Succession), the assassination was a failure simply because Garfield was only three months into his presidency and was killed before he had the chance to pass any meaningful legislation, consigning both assassin and target to history’s half-remembered footnotes.
Not all of this works, it should be said. The abrupt tonal shifts can be jarring, and the parallel stories of Garfield and Guiteau sometimes feel detrimentally truncated. But a lot of it really works. Shannon is dependably superb, Macfadyen proves that there is literally nobody in the world better at playing useless eccentric idiots than he is, and the supporting cast is among the year’s very best across TV and film. It’s proper, flawed, muscular TV that seeks to make a real point and do so in style, and it’s pretty hard to dispute the fact that it succeeds more often than it fails.
Picking up in 1880, Death by Lightning finds Garfield as a humble farmer and Civil War veteran working his Ohio farm, the furthest thing from a presidential candidate. His nomination is, in many ways, a complete accident. Out of principle alone, he attends the Republican Convention in Chicago to make a nominating speech in favour of John Sherman (Alistair Petrie), who is going against the heavily favoured – and flagrantly corrupt – Ulysses Grant, propped up by Senator Roscoe Conkling (Shea Whigham; To the Stars, American Primeval, F1: The Movie) and Chester Arthur (Nick Offerman; 3Below: Tales of Arcadia, A League of Their Own, The Last of Us), the Collector of the Port of New York. But Garfield’s oration is so stirring that he ends up getting the nomination himself, much to the dismay of his wife, Lucretia (Betty Gilpin; A Dog’s Journey, The Tomorrow War, American Primeval), setting him on a road to the White House and, sadly, his own demise, which occurred at the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad Station in 1881.
Matthew Macfadyen as Charles Guiteau in episode 102 of Death by Lightning. Cr. Larry Horricks/Netflix © 2025
Garfield’s ostensible killer, Charles Guiteau, is desperate and delusional more than overtly sinister and evil. He’s the late-nineteenth-century equivalent of someone on an obscure message board who brags about one time having encountered a celebrity in an airport lounge. Guiteau, who was evidently mentally ill in some manner and came from a background of abuse likely worsened by his involvement in the cult-like utopian religious sect the Oneida Community, convinced himself that, thanks to a speech he wrote in favour of Grant that he quickly revised to be in favour of Garfield when he was unexpectedly nominated, he was instrumental in Garfield’s eventual defeat of Democrat Winfield Scott Hancock that November. This, he believed, entitled him to a consulship, but his fervent requests for a position within the Republican party were constantly – and often mockingly – rejected.
In the build-up of these parallel and then intersecting stories, Death by Lightning is often brilliant. Shannon is righteous in his famed oratory and projects the intelligence and everyday decency he was known for as a progressive, or at least what constituted for one in 1880. Macfadyen is manic and hilarious, but deeply sad in his way, a man led to believe that he was always on the cusp of acceptance and grandeur but, really, was never in the running at all. Both leads would have been better served by a fuller six or eight-episode season that catalogued their backstories and personal lives more forensically; Garfield’s Civil War service, say, and Guiteau’s various failed endeavours, delusions, and relationship with his father, who believed he was possessed by Satan.
The supporting cast is wonderful too, especially Offerman, who plays Chester Arthur – the U.S. President even more forgettable than Garfield himself – as a bewhiskered, drunken brute who evolves a conscience in real time. Whigham, too, who is for my money one of the most underrated character actors in the world at the best of times, is fabulous as Conkling, a hyper-exaggerated parody of institutional rot who dresses like Willy Wonka.
There is, however, a touch of A House of Dynamite in the casting of very talented actors as really significant historical figures – Vondie Curtis-Hall, for instance, plays Frederick Douglass – who end up with almost nothing to do here. It seems to be becoming a trend for Netflix to pay hand over fist to pad out a big-name billing, whether it serves a project or not. This would have been all well and good in a more substantive series that dug into Garfield’s efforts in Civil Rights reform, and that spent more time on his long, painful death through medical malpractice and checked in more regularly on Guiteau during his incarceration, but here it feels like a bit of a waste.
Don’t let that put you off, though, as Death by Lightning is full of striking sequences and award-worthy performances, and is impossible not to recommend as a rare period piece that puts entertainment value over strict authenticity and detail. It’s really very good indeed for much of its too-short runtime, and if it concludes in a bit of a hurry, that seems a small price to pay for the rest of it.
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