Have you seen Death By Lightning yet? What are your thoughts?
Unsurprisingly, I binged Netflix's Death By Lightning as soon as it was released. I've been excited since the moment they announced the project, and I am the target audience for a series like that, so I'm almost always going to enjoy it. And to further interest me, they ended up casting some of my very favorite actors: Michael Shannon, Matthew Macfadyen, Shea Whigham, Bradley Whitford, Betty Gilpin, and Nick Offerman are all people that I enjoy in practically everything they are in. It also looked great. The period-specific sets, clothing, facial hair -- everything looked like it was 1880/1881, and that's always important. The setting is a character of its own and they did a fantastic job transporting us to the time period. It's also much funnier than you might expect for a historic series based on a disgruntled officer-seeker shooting the President, who lingered for over two months in excruciating pain and died from infections caused by a doctor needlessly digging around inside him with dirty fingers to find a bullet that didn't need to be removed.
So, I definitely enjoyed it.
With that said -- and I'm not including any spoilers about the series itself (although I hope everyone already knows that James Garfield dies) -- I did have a few issues. Mainly, it was WAY too short. Only four episodes -- and I think one of the episodes is only 30 minutes long! Because of that, everything was really rushed, and some of the stories that could have been fleshed out and added so much more were either skimmed over or skipped altogether. The story of Roscoe Conkling and Kate Chase Sprague could have been explored much more deeply and given significantly more background to those characters and their place in that world.
I thought they did a great job with Garfield and reinforced what I always have believed: Garfield was a special person and could have been a remarkable President. He died before his 50th birthday and served less than 200 days as President and 79 of those days were spent dying. He had SO much promise and would have been a giant of American history had he lived and been able to accomplish what he envisioned.
The portrayal of Arthur was a bit cartoonish. Although they showed a bit of his evolution, I think they did a disservice to what HE accomplished once he succeeded Garfield. If they were truly unable to make more episodes than what we saw, I feel like they should have chosen to tell the story in a different sequence, or focus a majority of the story on different parts than they did. Obviously, it was important to give a lot of context to who Charles Guiteau was and what brought him to his actions, and I think they did a great job on that. But the Garfield/Arthur/Conkling/Blaine aspects of the story could have been told better if they hadn't had rushed through many parts.
Again, I enjoyed Death By Lightning, and was probably always going to enjoy it, no matter what. I just think there some real missed opportunities. It's SUCH a fascinating snapshot of history to just focus on what happened from 1880-1882 and those main characters (Garfield, Arthur, Conkling, Blaine, and Guiteau) had so much more to be explored.
All of the actors were great, by the way. I never would have imagined Michael Shannon as James Garfield, but now I can't imagine another actor in that role. Matthew Macfadyen was INCREDIBLE as Charles Guiteau. And, as I mentioned when seeing the trailer, there is a lot of Tom Wambsgans from Succession in Guiteau -- just the neediness and naked ambition. Guiteau was batshit crazy, of course, but there's definitely a throughline between the two characters. Offerman should get an Emmy just for nailing the facial hair of Chester Arthur. We could always use more Betty Gilpin and Brad Whitford.
So, go watch Death By Lightning! It's great for history-lovers. I just wish we had six or eight hour-long episodes!
