In Death by Lightning, history turns hysterical — and haunting

In the crowded field of prestige historical dramas, 'Death by Lightning' arrives with an energy that feels almost insolent: brisk, irreverent, and totally uninterested in the usual sepia solemnity that comes with tales of dead presidents. Instead, this four-part Netflix series plays like a hybrid of character tragedy, political autopsy, and tragicomedy of American ambition gone rancid. 

It is held together almost entirely by one performance—Matthew Macfadyen's astonishing embodiment of Charles Guiteau, the no-hope fantasist who, in 1881, shot James A Garfield and expected gratitude for his trouble.

Guiteau's opening proclamation—"My name will be known one day all across this country!"—lands as both a threat and a plea. History mostly foiled his ambition; he and Garfield became the sort of answers that derail pub quizzes, rather than canonical figures in the nation's political imagination. 

The series takes that obscurity as its starting point, reanimating both men for a modern audience but quickly making clear that one of them is far better dramatic company. Garfield may be the tragedy; Guiteau is the noise, the spectacle, the grotesque magnet pulling every scene towards him.

Macfadyen is, quite simply, extraordinary. Having sharpened the art of the ambitious loser across four seasons of Succession, he here perfects a rarer figure: the loser without a bargain to strike, without talent, without a strategy—just hunger.

Wild-eyed and perpetually rearranging clothes that look like they've been slept in since 1879, his Guiteau exudes the stale scent of desperation. He ricochets between humiliations: a bank manager visibly recoils at his request for a loan; his sister's husband declares him a parasite with weary certainty; even years in a free-love commune yield nothing but ridicule. Women find him unbearable, creditors avoid him, and anyone with sense recognises the sort of unearned zeal that precedes disaster.

Death by Lightning may tell a story from 1881, but its real sting is contemporary. It shows how a system riddled with ego and favouritism can produce both heroes and cranks, and how sometimes the crank gets close enough to do real damage. But above all, it becomes a showcase for an actor at the peak of his powers. Macfadyen doesn't just play Guiteau; he diagnoses him. And in doing so, he gives the man what he always wanted—recognition, at last, though not in the form he imagined.

The show's greatest triumph is how it channels this pathetic energy into something both comic and distressing. Macfadyen never lets Guiteau become a mere crank; he grants him a cracked kind of earnestness. 

When the man glimpses the Republican convention in Chicago and convinces himself destiny has arrived, it feels both inevitable and horribly sad. His belief that Garfield will recognise him as an ally, perhaps even a friend, becomes the source of the series' most painful scene: their meeting, long fantasised about, is a disaster of exposed neediness. Macfadyen allows us to watch a man discover—perhaps for the first time—that he has no interior worth showing.

Parallel to Guiteau's story runs the straighter, more honourable thread of Garfield's political rise. Michael Shannon plays the president with characteristic steeliness, though the role is far less dramatically generous. 

Garfield was a thoughtful, principled man, and the series respects this to the point of constraining him; he is almost too steadfast, too composed, to ignite drama. Even his extraordinary convention speech, which in reality vaulted him to an unexpected nomination, is staged with admirable fidelity but little narrative frenzy.

Yet the political narrative around him does spark, largely thanks to Shea Whigham's delightfully villainous Roscoe Conkling—arrogance wrapped in pomade—and a superb Nick Offerman as Chester Arthur, a man whose stomach seems to rebel as fiercely against the corruption around him as his conscience does. 

Offerman's portrayal swings from volcanic boorishness to moments of startling fragility. In him, the series finds its clearest statement about the Gilded Age: the machinery of patronage could turn almost anyone into a monster, but sometimes—rarely, unpredictably—the monster cracks.

Where Death by Lightning falters is in its haste. Its desire to keep runtime under four hours leads to compressed character arcs, bursts of explanatory dialogue, and female characters who struggle to be heard above the male din. 

The series' final episode pushes further into the grotesque. Guiteau treats his trial as a stage, proclaiming himself a visionary and constructing a ludicrous self-portrait as a martyr of political necessity. Even his eventual hanging becomes, in his mind, a final chance at applause. In reality he dies as he lived: deluded, ignored, and pathetic. But Macfadyen ensures that the viewer, at least, cannot look away.

What elevates Death by Lightning from a clever historical re-enactment into something more potent is the context it quietly absorbs from contemporary America. Garfield's assassination is shown not simply as the result of one man's madness but as an end-product of a political culture that rewarded flattery, patronage, and factionalism. 

The Stalwart–Half-Breed factional wars of the 1880s may sound antique, but their essence—contempt for reform, party over principle, theatrical loyalty tests—feels unnervingly modern. The show suggests that Guiteau's delusion was nurtured by the very system he aspired to join; he simply absorbed its logic too literally.

The supplementary historical material that underpins the drama—drawn from Candice Millard's Destiny of the Republic—adds depth to the analysis. Garfield emerges as a Renaissance man: classicist, orator, minister, lawyer, educator, a president who neither sought the office nor owed it to political debt. 

His progressive commitments, particularly to civil rights, give his truncated presidency a tragic "what if" that the series occasionally gestures toward but never fully explores. The result is a drama more focused on the perverse charisma of failure than on the potential of lost greatness.

Yet perhaps that is the point. Garfield was genuinely admirable, but admiration alone doesn't sustain drama. Guiteau, with his bottomless hunger for recognition and capacity for catastrophic self-delusion, is the sort of figure television cannot resist. 

And in Macfadyen's hands, he becomes unforgettable—not because he is villainous, but because he is recognisable. We have seen shades of him in modern politics, in online extremism, in every echo chamber that convinces the untalented that destiny owes them an audience.

Death by Lightning may tell a story from 1881, but its real sting is contemporary. It shows how a system riddled with ego and favouritism can produce both heroes and cranks, and how sometimes the crank gets close enough to do real damage. But above all, it becomes a showcase for an actor at the peak of his powers. Macfadyen doesn't just play Guiteau; he diagnoses him. And in doing so, he gives the man what he always wanted—recognition, at last, though not in the form he imagined.

For all the horror and humour, it's Macfadyen's performance that lingers. Garfield's name is remembered, but it is Guiteau—sweaty, needy, deluded—who steals the show.

Death by Lightning is streaming on Netflix.