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The series is based on Candice Millard's 2011 bestseller Destiny of the Republic, a nonfiction account of Garfield's assassination that wove together politics, medicine, and even the inventor Alexander Graham Bell, who tried to build a device to locate the bullet lodged in the president's body.
Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and D. B. Weiss served as executive producers, part of their overall deal at Netflix, lending the historical miniseries considerable prestige-television pedigree behind the camera.
History records that Garfield likely survived the initial shooting and was slowly killed over the following weeks by his own physicians, who repeatedly probed the wound with unsterilized hands and instruments, a grim medical irony that the series draws on for much of its tragic power.
Death by Lightning is a Netflix limited series that dramatizes one of the strangest and most tragic chapters in American political history: the assassination of President James A. Garfield. Adapted from Candice Millard's acclaimed nonfiction book Destiny of the Republic, the four-part drama was created by Mike Makowsky and executive produced by a team that includes David Benioff and D. B. Weiss of Game of Thrones fame.
Michael Shannon stars as Garfield, the reluctant, principled Ohioan swept into the presidency in 1880 almost against his will, while Matthew Macfadyen plays Charles Guiteau, the delusional, chronically failed office-seeker who came to believe he was destined to kill the president. The series braids their two lives together, tracing Garfield's improbable ascent and Guiteau's descent into fatal grandiosity, before turning to the grim aftermath in which the president's own doctors may have done more harm than the assassin's bullet. Nick Offerman, Betty Gilpin, Shea Whigham, and Bradley Whitford round out the ensemble.
Critics praised the series for its dark wit, its detailed period craft, and the performances of its two leads, with Macfadyen's twitchy, tragicomic Guiteau drawing particular attention. Both a political tragedy and a mordant character study, it revives a largely forgotten American story for a modern audience. Death by Lightning is streaming on Netflix.
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