“Assassination can no more be guarded against than death by lightning,” James Garfield wrote two weeks after his unprecedented ascension to the presidency of the United States. His words would come to have tragic significance: Less than a year later, Garfield was dead, his term in office cut short by an assassin’s bullet.
Now a new limited series starring Michael Shannon and Matthew Macfadyen tells the story of Garfield’s brief presidency. Its title? Fittingly, Death by Lightning. You can watch the new trailer for it above.
Before it explodes into tragedy, Death by Lightning is often funny: The trailer gives us a glimpse at the many travails of Charles Guiteau (Macfadyen) as he tries desperately to get the attention of President Garfield (Shannon). “Eat shit! I’m a taxpayer!” he yells at one point, but also pleads with Garfield to tell him “how I can be great.” Guiteau’s delusions of grandeur would come to have a seismic impact on America’s cultural fabric, but before he was an assassin, he was a nuisance.
For creator Mike Makowsky (Bad Education), Guiteau’s pathetic grasp at notoriety was the perfect way into the series, which is based on Candice Millard’s acclaimed book Destiny of the Republic. “I told [Candice] that when I read the book, it reminded me so much of Rupert Pupkin in The King of Comedy,” Makowsky tells Tudum, referring to Robert De Niro’s character in Martin Scorsese’s cult 1982 film.
In The King of Comedy, aspiring comedian Pupkin is so desperate to perform on The Jerry Langford Show that he eventually develops a crackpot scheme to abduct its host (Jerry Lewis). It’s a compelling analogue, but Millard, unaware of the film, was perplexed. “She didn’t know what The King of Comedy was,” Makowsky recalls. “She heard the word comedy and was like, ‘He wants to make a comedy?’ ”
Millard came around — and Death by Lightning, in its final form, is much more than comedy or tragedy. It’s the story of America at a pivot point, and an elegy for a forgotten president shot down before his time. “The fact that he’s been relegated to this obscure footnote because he was targeted by an assassin is a great tragedy,” Makowsky says. “It is one of the great ‘what ifs’ in American history.”
Death by Lightning strikes Netflix on Nov. 6.
