Death by Lightning

The Architecture of an Afterthought

One of the drearier things about the way American history gets taught is how quickly it flattens into a wall of stern men with facial hair. A few names survive as myth. The rest get reduced to trivia. James A. Garfield usually lands in the trivia pile—the president who barely got started before he was shot at a train station. I knew the outline, not the person.

*Death by Lightning*, Mike Makowsky's four-episode Netflix series, tries to fix that. I'm just not convinced it ever completely decides how to do it. The show revives Garfield (Michael Shannon) alongside his assassin, Charles Guiteau (Matthew Macfadyen), and opens with the wonderfully grotesque image of Guiteau's brain floating in a jar. That should tell you where the tone lives: somewhere between stately tragedy and mean little workplace farce. At its best, the mixture is invigorating. At its worst, it gives you tonal whiplash.



A lot of viewers are probably going to know immediately whether they're on the show's wavelength, because the script keeps tossing modern phrases into 1880 mouths. People say things like "I'll keep you posted" and "I'm a lefty" while dressed in layers of heavy wool. Shea Whigham, wearing Roscoe Conkling's heroic hairpiece like a separate political ideology, seems to understand the joke better than anyone. But beneath the stylistic messing around, there is a surprisingly soft center to the whole thing.

That softness comes from Shannon. He's made a career out of men who look like they could break a door off its hinges, so it's striking to see him play Garfield as decent to the point of vulnerability. During the 1880 Republican National Convention, Garfield arrives merely intending to back another candidate, then accidentally talks himself into the presidency because his speech is too lucid and decent for the room to ignore. Shannon sells the moment beautifully. He doesn't glow with triumph. He looks alarmed. His body sags under the weight of a thing he never quite sought. That reluctance is exactly what makes him feel fit for office.



Macfadyen's Guiteau is the ugly mirror version of that story. If Garfield is accidental competence, Guiteau is accidental nothingness weaponized by ego. He has failed at law, failed at preaching, and somehow even washed out of a 19th-century free-love commune for being unbearable. Macfadyen plays him like a man whose humiliation is always one breath away from turning theatrical. *The Guardian* was right to say he takes his expertise with "grasping losers to another level." Every time he straightens his clothes or corners somebody with a new delusion, the show becomes physically embarrassing in the best way.

The structure keeps crosscutting between Garfield and Guiteau as both men move toward the same dreadful endpoint. It's a clever idea, though not without cost. Guiteau is so grotesquely vivid that Garfield can sometimes feel pushed to the edge of his own biography.



Nick Offerman has a great time as Chester A. Arthur, appearing first as a half-pickled operator and then, slowly, as a man horrified to discover a conscience trying to grow where cynicism used to be. His scenes with Shannon give the series some badly needed comic air.

Because when the shooting finally comes, the show refuses to mythologize it. There is no grand ideological duel here, no noble fatalism. Just waste. A decent, capable president gets cut down by a man who thinks notoriety is the same thing as significance. Makowsky lingers on that ugliness, and by the end I felt oddly bereft—not just for Garfield, but for the version of public life his brief presidency suggested and never had time to become. The mediocrity that kills him feels painfully current.