I, like probably many folks, only know about Charles Guiteau’s assassination of short-term president James Garfield from Stephen Sondheim’s musical Assassins. So I was a little baffled when I saw the trailer for Netflix’s Death by Lightning, a four-episode series about the largely forgotten moment in history. But this question of memory is one of the things the show grapples with, and it ends up turning my first thought of “why would you make a show about this?” into something modern and affecting.
I don’t think Death by Lightning would work with a lesser cast. Succession’s Matthew Macfadyen as Guiteau is such a good choice–if anyone should play a minor historical figure with delusions of grandeur, it’s the guy who played Tom Wambsgans. Nick Offerman is very fun as vice president Chester A. Arthur, which is not a thing I’ve ever said about Chester A. Arthur. Michael Shannon brings a lot of depth to Garfield, though it always remains a little unfortunate that the show chooses to focus on him so much, when despite being the pillar around which all these interesting characters spin, he’s often the least interesting character in the room.
After giving a stirring speech in support of another candidate at the 1880 Republican National Convention, Garfield is elected the party’s presidential candidate. He’s surrounded by corrupt, self-serving blowhards, and over the course of his campaign he becomes convinced that maybe he can undo the political machine. In this way he’s very similar to Guiteau, a grifter who at least professes to have noble intentions, and who never quite seems to believe he’s grifting even as he lies and steals and confabulates. After a brief encounter on the campaign trail, Guiteau comes to believe he’s destined for a powerful position in Garfeild’s administration, and he spends the rest of the series trying to get what he feels he deserves.
Death by Lightning walks a skillful line where there’s never any of the unbearable secondhand cringe of shows like The Office in watching Guiteau put himself out there. Guiteau often comes off as completely earnest and legitimate, which helps him con and win over those around him. He’s enthusiastic about and interested in people, and he’s both a very good con man and a terrible one, often failing to think through crucial bits of his cover stories because he seems to believe his own lies too much. He’s good at getting himself into the right place at the right time, but despite making real relationship in-roads with Arthur and others, he can never quite cross the line into becoming an actual insider. It’s hard not to root for him when Macfadyen plays him so compellingly, but it’s also impossible to root for him when he is so obviously wrong about what he thinks is happening. He is, in some ways, a parallel of Garfield’s quest to end political corruption–he believes that anyone should have a shot at greatness, and that people should do what they say they’re going to do–but he also completely embodies that corruption in his willingness to say and do anything to get close to power.
After completely undoing himself in an audience with Garfield–Guiteau’s artifice falls away, and he begs the president to “help me succeed like you did… Tell me how I can be great too” in a moment that is wonderfully intimate and also completely blowing it–and after finally being told in no uncertain terms he has no hope of a position in Garfield’s administration, Guiteau turns from being a booster for the president to seeing him as a corrupt liar Guiteau alone is charged with stamping out. Given that this turn is probably the only reason you’ve ever heard Guiteau’s name, it’s a bit unfortunate that most of this arc is crammed into the show’s final episode, which also has to cover the shooting, Garfield’s slow death from infection, and Guiteau’s trial. Too much of Death by Lightning’s final hour is taken up by a focus on Garfield that felt unnecessary and not terribly interesting compared to the big questions Guiteau’s character raises, even as it’s moving to see those close to him struggle with his death. The show clearly wants to highlight the similarities between Garfield and Guiteau’s stories and the things they’ve done to earn their non-places in history, but the focus on Garfield as the lens through which to do it leaves a lot of good stuff on the table.
I was meant to see a 2001 Assassins revival that was ultimately delayed to 2004 after 9/11 made its subject matter feel inappropriate; living in New York as Bush used my city as a pretense for war felt like the perfect time for the show to me, even though I understood the argument against it. Death by Lightning could be held to a similar “really, now?” criticism, though rather than raising issues about our current president or Charlie Kirk, its subject matter felt closest to some of the rhetoric of January 6. What are the consequences of the intimacy between a political leader and their adherents, whether that intimacy is a true belief or just campaign trail smoke? What does the government owe its people compared to what they perceive they’re owed, and what should people do when they feel failed? What happens to historical moments when history itself gets its claws in them–the meaning of January 6 is being constantly rewritten, its participants by turn traitors and heroes, but which story will win out in the arc of history? Will any of these people be remembered and, if so, for what? Death by Lightning’s Guiteau feels like a precursor to those who stormed the Capitol in 2021, deluded and disenfranchised, seeing in the anti-Garfield rhetoric around him a chance to air his own personal grievances and try–and fail–to make them about something bigger than himself.
In the end, Death by Lightning feels like it shines a light on the temporary nature of history, how the things that matter so much to us as we live through them will be seen differently by those who come after, if they even think of us at all. It reminds the viewer that no moment in history is the most important moment in history, even if it feels that way to its participants. While it works against itself a bit in the way it handles Garfield, it’s a welcome reminder that history is still happening and that our roles in it are still being written.
