‘Death by Lightning’ Review: Michael Shannon and Matthew Macfadyen Headline Netflix’s Mostly Gripping, Slightly Rushed Presidential Assassination Thriller

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Honestly, not to give Netflix too much credit for artistic integrity, but I’m a little amazed that Death by Lightning is airing at all. Based on the recent gutless precedent set by the more innocuous The Savantwe can assume that Apple would have either buried Death by Lightning entirely or at least shunted it off into a corner of the viewing platform populated by 150 other shows featuring award-winning stars and zero promotion.

Like Sondheim’s Assassins and last year’s Manhuntthe four-episode Death by Lightning is an exploration of political violence that attempts to situate assassination attempts, and their unwell perpetrators, as rot adjacent to the nobler aspirations of the American Dream, an uncomfortable exposé of a unique form of celebrity.

It’s a provocative minefield of a topic, one that creator Mike Makowsky, working from Candice Millard’s very fine Destiny of the Republicnavigates with relative confidence. I say “relative” because, after nearly three episodes spent effectively introducing Matthew Macfadyen’s Charles J. Guiteau and elevating James Garfield (Michael Shannon) from the scrapheap of cartoon cat-based ephemera, Death by Lightning rushes through Garfield’s actual death, which is in many ways the most bizarre aspect of the story.

It leaves Death by Lightning feeling abruptly and somewhat conclusively unsatisfying — but probably makes it a safer sell in the current moment, when a more thorough take on political violence would yield controversy and corporate discomfort. Plus, even delivering the story in truncated form in no way detracts from the strong and occasionally deliriously fun performances from Macfadyen, Shannon and the supporting likes of Nick Offerman, Betty Gilpin, Bradley Whitford and Shea Whigham.

After a framing device best summarized as “They Saved Guiteau’s Brain,” Makowsky (Bad Education) leaps into action with the parallel stories of Garfield and Guiteau circa 1880.

As we meet Garfield, he’s leaving his Ohio farm, much to his plucky wife Lucretia’s (Gilpin) chagrin, to make a nominating speech for John Sherman’s (Alistair Petrie) presidential candidacy at the Republican Convention in Chicago. Sherman is not going to win the nomination, but Garfield is a man of principles and he’s determined to stand up for the party’s integrity. It seems inevitable that the nomination is going to go to Ulysses Grant, notoriously corrupt and the preferred candidate of the New York political machine, which is controlled by Senator Roscoe Conkling (Whigham) and right-hand man Chester Arthur (Offerman), the Collector of the Port of New York, presented here as one of the shadiest and most powerful positions in the land.

The thing you don’t know about James Garfield, if you only know him in terms of jokes about Odie and Nermal, is that he was, to use anachronistic parlance, a reasonably good dude. He wasn’t perfect. This was 1880. Nobody was. But he was a family man, an intellectual and a progressive with a lower-case “p,” a figure whose murder led fairly directly to the collapse of Reconstruction, causing damage that one could argue still hasn’t been fully repaired. Garfield’s ascension to the presidency is both fascinating and wildly entertaining, and Makowsky and series director Matt Ross capture that rise exceptionally in the early, fully realized episodes of the series.

Guiteau is interesting, too, a clearly troubled man who became mobilized in ways the series links unavoidably, for me at least, to current online message boards and other radical corners of the web. Before there were incels, there was Charles Guiteau, who spent five years as a near-literal eunuch at the orgy that was the Oneida Community. Guiteau had childhood traumas and delusions of grandeur, but his desire to find purpose through public service is presented as at least partially earnest. At a moment when people off the street could fairly easily encounter powerful politicians in hotel lobbies and, in the case of Arthur, rowdy beer halls, Guiteau wasn’t wholly deluded to believe he was on the fringe of the Republican establishment. He was just mostly deluded.

For three episodes, the series builds context and character extremely well. Sticking to the general vicinity of the facts — with only occasional winking nods to, like, the two-sided populist desire for political outsiders that could lead to a James Garfield or a Donald Trump — Death by Lightning is substantive, but rarely weighty in a way that might usurp the entertainment value.

Anchoring the series are the lead performances. Shannon projects intelligence and a likably grouchy reluctance as Garfield rises to a position that he claims he never aspired to, but perhaps subconsciously craved. He captures Garfield’s famed (at the time, at least) oratory and, in scenes with Gilpin — a master at playing 21st-century women trapped in period costumes — and Laura Marcus as his daughter Molly, Shannon keeps Garfield’s doomed decency in the foreground. My ideal version of the show — probably six to eight episodes, lest you think I only complain that TV shows are too long — gets a little more into Garfield’s Civil War experience and the more complicated aspects of his ideology that might have sullied the lower-case “p” progressive identity the series wants to project.

Keeping the wild glint in his eye throughout, Macfadyen never makes Guiteau’s actions overly justifiable, but conveys what it would be like to be a dreamer positioned by circumstances as constantly on the edge of success and fame and notoriety, only to eventually become an anonymous brain-in-a-jar. The performance is funny and manic and just the right amount of sad and desperate.

The supporting players who get showcased at the convention are generally excellent, my favorite performance coming from Offerman, who has, in Arthur, the rare future president who somehow becomes even more of a footnote than Garfield. (Chester Arthur was never the namesake for a film feline voiced by Bill Murray.) There are scenes in which Offerman is very clearly playing drunk Chester Arthur as a spiritual partner to drunk Ron Swanson, yielding some of the biggest laughs I’ve ever gotten out of a limited series ostensibly about a political assassination. But somewhere, never fully buried in the comedic broadness, is a possibly heartbreaking examination of a man told for years that he’s a blunt instrument only to realize that he might have a refined soul. Plus, who doesn’t love Nick Offerman sharing the screen with absurd facial hair? Nobody, that’s who.

The series offers Whitford his latest opportunity to express general bemusement with the American political process, this time sporting a bushy white beard, and Whigham his latest opportunity to be an uncouth bull in an otherwise genteel china shop. These are very good actors doing, in a small sample size, what they do best.

The show is less successful shoehorning actual trailblazing figures like Frederick Douglass (Vondie Curtis-Hall) and Blanche Bruce (Barry Shabaka Henley), as well as the more-interesting-than-she’s-presented-here Kate Chase Sprague (Tuppence Middleton), into the piece. I’m also confused how you cast Andor breakout Kyle Soller as Robert Todd Lincoln, son of a previous assassinated president and Garfield’s secretary of war, and give him, by my count, zero lines of dialogue.

Was the younger Lincoln a part of material drafted for a longer second half of the series that got trimmed? I can’t say for sure, but Death by Lightning rushes headlong toward an inevitable bloody confrontation between Garfield and Guiteau and then … rushes through Garfield’s death, which was famously and relevantly unrushed. It took, spoiler alert, 2.5 months for Garfield to, spoiler alert, die — a process that found him at the historical fulcrum of multiple medical innovations that might have saved his life. Zeljko Ivanek is perfectly sour as clueless Dr. Bliss, the man tasked with tending to Garfield, but there are so many elements of Millard’s book that could have been the stuff of an expanded second half of the series that barely registers here. The same is true of Guiteau’s eventual imprisonment and trial, which aren’t ignored but barely touch on the wackiness that actually ensued.

Although missed opportunities abound in the final chapter, that minor disappointment didn’t fully mute my affection for the first three hours and for several performances that I hope awards voters remember come Emmy season next summer. Offerman may have been snubbed for donning tiny hats and dancing on Parks and Recreationbut allowing the same thing to occur for Death by Lightning would be an equally egregious crime.

Now, back to humming “The Ballad of Guiteau” for me.