Death by Lightning
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I mentioned a couple weeks back my plan to watch Death by Lightning, the new Netflix series on the assassination of James Garfield. Having now watched and had time to ruminate, I can highly recommend for those who haven’t yet had the opportunity to partake. I thought that it captured the fundamentally alien feel of the 19th century without indulging too much in the aspects of the time that a modern viewer would find bizarre and distracting, something that I call the “Deadwood Index.” Michael Shannon did a fine job as James Garfield, even as the script leaned hagiographic on a President most of us can barely remember. Matthew Macfadyen played Guiteau as Tom Wambsgans with the lunacy dialed slightly up, but only slightly. It’s such a joy to watch Macfadyen in that role that I didn’t mind the derivative feeling. Nick Offerman (who has always had a bit of the 19th century to him) was fine as Chester A. Arthur, and while Betty Gilpin wasn’t allowed a lot of space to run she made the most of her time.
With respect to the politics, the script did not quite recreate Garfield as a civil rights hero, although occasionally it drifted in that direction. Importantly, it recognized that turning out the Black vote in the North (less so in the South by 1880) was critical to Republican electoral fortunes, and thus candidates had to do standard politicking in Black communities. The 1880 GOP convention in particular was quite a lot of fun to watch.
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