The somewhat ironic hook — and by its end, the lesson of the whole thing — of “Death by Lightning” is its exploration of what is essentially a throwaway piece of trivia: the ascendancy and three-month administration of a president that few remember, after being killed by a man who even fewer know. It’s a kind of joke the show opens with and it’s a fact that Lucretia Garfield (Betty Gilpin), wife of the slain President James Garfield (Michael Shannon), explicitly laments in its final moments.
Yet for all this niche, quirky history, you might also see a rather modern American story here: a portrait of spineless grifters, corrupt politics and the parasocial nature of celebrity and proximity to power, all of which tornadoes into a public act of gun violence.
But “Death by Lightning” is not so self-serious — the series is often as focused on comedy as much as lofty political drama — and thankfully so. This is, after all, just a blip of a chapter of U.S. history it’s covering. Indeed, only four episodes, the limited series is somewhat slight for a handsomely detailed period piece, flitting between the two stories of James Garfield’s unexpected rise to the presidency and the vague delusions of his eventual assassinator, Charles Guiteau (Matthew MacFayden).
It is, in other words, a show that tells its story in a swift, condensed form, but doesn’t exactly demand more for not having that much more story to tell. Instead, what we’re here for mostly is to watch just about every one of your favorite character actors play Reconstruction-era “House of Cards” for a couple hours, an exercise the cast makes pleasurable enough to justify the enterprise.
Shannon plays Garfield, a shift for the superb actor, who so often is in the mode of off-kilter or deranged. Here, he is a politician who is such an innately decent and good man that the show borders on arbitrary hagiography (for someone like Abraham Lincoln, that kind of noble portraiture is unavoidable — but for Garfield?). A congressman, family man and war hero who has tried to bury his PTSD in good cheer and good deeds (perhaps the show’s best moment is Garfield’s monologue about how he chose to respond to his trauma), he is so humble and self-effacing during a rousing speech at a Republican convention that it unwittingly catapults him to the presidency.
Shannon, for what it’s worth, plays this kind of mythic goodness with a soft and patient humanism that makes you want to follow the president’s orders yourself. But all around Garfield is dirty power grabbing, and the only way to get things to work is to try to pick which enemies to use (the drunkard Vice President Chester A. Arthur, played by Nick Offerman) and which to disempower (Arthur’s crony Senator Roscoe Conkling, played by Shea Whigham).
While Washington politics play out, we observe Guiteau, an ordinary citizen if sort of aimless loser by all accounts, who is recently released from jail and onto his latest dead-end exploit: starting a newspaper. That process mostly involves him trying to stage-door Washington power brokers, and his brief encounters with politicians (including, eventually, a one-on-one meeting with Garfield himself) convince him that he’s owed a position within Garfield’s administration, setting the stage for his eventually violent ire.
MacFayden’s comic idiocy, so reminiscent of his “Succession” days, can sometimes muddy the tone of the show, but it’s plenty fun to watch him and Offerman play a kind of dunce odd couple, one delusional and the other often blackout drunk, when their paths occasionally collide. But often it feels as if the two narrative tracks between Garfield and Guiteau are separate shows entirely: one a costume drama about dirty politics, the other a kind of comedy about an idiot Travis Bickle.
On the latter, Guiteau is mostly just amusingly feckless until he’s suddenly something far more dangerous — an air-headed opportunist who can’t actually capitalize on any of his schemes so he has to rely on delusions of grandeur and the power of a gun to finally make a name for himself. That arc isn’t all too convincing, perhaps only because MacFayden’s haplessness doesn’t ever believably look like it can fester into erratic violence.
Yet there’s a sad revelation to be found in Guiteau’s story. His murderous turn is the tale of a failed swindler who was rightfully erased by history. But what he believed in was, by his own account early on in the show, essentially a version of the American Dream: that anyone from anywhere can make it in this country — including those who lie, steal, cheat and flatter their way up to the top. He happened to prove that version of the dream wrong. So many others, people who were simply better or luckier grifters than him, continue to prove it soberingly right.
“Death by Lightning” is now streaming on Netflix.