Death by Lightning Series-Premiere Recap: A Man Can Be Anyone

Death by Lightning
The Man From Ohio
Season 1 Episode 1
Editor’s Rating ★★★★★
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“This is a true story about two men the world forgot. One was the 20th president of the United States. The other shot him.” 

That’s the bitter epigraph that opens this invigorating first episode of Death by Lightning, and one important aspect of the book on which this miniseries is based, Candice Millard’s Destiny of the Republic, is that the 20th president didn’t deserve to be forgotten. The Garfield of the book is, so far anyway, the Garfield of the show, carrying a humility and nobility that’s frankly disconcerting coming from Michael Shannon, who’s usually cast as more wayward types. (I did a double take when learning Matthew Macfadyen, not Shannon, had been tapped to play Charles Guiteau, though that decision is justified the moment Macfadyen opens his mouth.) In Millard’s telling, Garfield truly was a potential successor to Lincoln, a great orator and sturdy Midwesterner who abhorred slavery and spoke to the country’s highest ideals.

Except that Garfield died 200 days into his presidency. Eighty of those days were spent in agonizing pain from a gunshot wound. Destiny of the Republic tells many different stories about America, but one is about how easily the nation’s progress can be undone by the actions of a single deranged, fame-seeking asshole.

The deranged, fame-seeking asshole here is Charles Guiteau, and it’s a small masterstroke for Death by Lightning to open in 1969, in a warehouse at the Army Medical Museum, with his preserved brain rolling around in a box. If this were Igor in Young Frankenstein, Guiteau’s jar would be the one marked “Abby Normal.” There’s a sense right away in this series that Garfield, a happily married congressman with a generous homestead in rural Ohio, would have been happy to be forgotten. By contrast, the words that greet this discovery at the museum, “Who the fuck is Charles Guiteau?!,” would have infuriated Guiteau, a man who envisioned the “destiny of the Republic” as one he’d have a hand in shaping.

But to reach his historical moment, Guiteau would have to climb out of a deep hole, and Death by Lightning takes that literally by opening with him serving out his latest prison sentence in a Manhattan detention facility called “the Tombs.” The chief judge in the five-man panel considering his case looks through Guiteau’s account of a “mix-up” with his landlord, pointing to a letter from Guiteau’s own father saying the two have been long “estranged” and assessing his shaky moral character, which includes a stretch among the hedonists of the Oneida Free Love Colony. Displaying a rhetorical gift that reflects Garfield’s like a carnival mirror, Guiteau likens himself to a great tradition of “rogues and migrants and freethinkers.” “Here and only here,” he says of America, “a man can be anyone.”

Though Guiteau and Garfield share a handshake at the end of “The Man From Ohio,” the episode elegantly sets them on the path to their crash course in Chicago, where they are pursuing important individual ambitions. Having been scooped up from prison by his sister Franny (Paula Malcomson), the sole family member with any affection for him, Guiteau announces a grand plan to raise seed funds for a newspaper called The Daily Theocrat. When he attempts to get those funds from a proper bank, he’s apparently counting on the loan manager to forget the man who threw a paperweight at his head a few years earlier. Meanwhile, Franny’s husband, George (Ben Miles), a well-to-do patent lawyer, doesn’t share his wife’s faith in her brother. When Guiteau inadvertently attacks her with an axe in a fit of unhinged rage, Franny quietly suggests that he check himself into an institution to work on his mental health. He’s merciful enough to his sister to agree, but he knows that all faith in him has been lost. He steals all the money from George’s safe and burns the last remaining bridge to anyone who cares about him.

Yet the real highlight of this episode is all the goings-on at the 1880 Republican National Convention, which is far from the multi-night commercial for party solidarity that they’ve become in the modern age. The presumptive favorite for the nomination is Ulysses S. Grant, the war hero who’d already served two terms in office and was seeking an unprecedented third. But in a presidency plagued by corruption and graft, the real power rests in his New York City cronies who, as Garfield’s wife, Lucretia (Betty Gilpin), colorfully phrases it, “parade [Grant] around their banquets like some puffed-up old totem.” Chief among Grant’s backers is Roscoe Conkling (Shea Whigham), a New York senator who benefits from the federal money funneled through the port and various other political favors. 

Though Grant’s ultimate failure to secure the nomination underscores his weakness within the party, his challengers at the convention, James G. Blaine (Bradley Whitford) and John Sherman (Alistair Petrie), are weaker still. Blaine is not quite as feckless, but Sherman has an ace in the hole in Garfield, who agrees to endorse him in a speech. Garfield’s speech, with its eloquent and fiery plea to the values of the Republicans under Lincoln, proves to be a little too good for Sherman’s purposes, leading some delegates to wonder if this dynamic representative from Ohio might be interested in the job. When a delegate from Pennsylvania gives him a single vote on one of the many, many ballots needed to get a majority, Garfield is furious and tries to take steps to prevent his name from coming up again, but he’s denied. He doesn’t want to be president, but he’s told he has no choice in the matter. 

Garfield offers an apology to Sherman, who’s deeply humiliated by this turn of events, but Sherman isn’t having it, and he offers perhaps the most important line of the episode: “Nobody makes a speech like that unless he craves it for himself.” The line feels true, and Shannon’s face suggests that Garfield is perhaps learning something about his ambition that he didn’t know. Lucretia seems to have known it before he does, too, because she says, “Whatever you do out there, don’t forget this” as she sends him away. While he does seem genuinely content with his family in Ohio, Garfield still came from abject poverty to get there, and his courage in battle for the Union cause speaks to a larger sense of duty. He may also have the slightly less noble quality of narcissism, which is the common denominator of every world leader who has ever lived. 

The reluctant nominee also has two snarling adversaries in Conkling and Chester A. Arthur (Nick Offerman) and one big new fan by the name of Charles Guiteau. It won’t be long until all three are gunning for him. 

Conklings 

• Referring to the Oneida community as a “free-love colony” makes it sound like a proto-hippie commune, but that could not be farther from the truth. This religious perfectionist group practiced group marriage, a sinister eugenicslike practice called “stirpiculture,” and “male sexual continence,” which is an orgasm-control principle. The founder, John Noyes, fled to Canada in the summer of 1879 to dodge statutory-rape charges. 

• That Hanni El Khatib cover of “I’ll Be Glad When You’re Dead (You Rascal You)” really hits hard after that cold open. The robust energy of this show, in general, is hugely encouraging. History can be fun! 

• The director of the episode (and the series) is Matt Ross, who HBO watchers will remember well as Alby Grant, the closeted son and heir to the Juniper Creek compound on Big Love, and Gavin Belson, the CEO of tech giant Hooli on Silicon Valley. More relevant to this show, Ross also directed the fine 2016 film Captain Fantastic, starring Viggo Mortensen as a domineering father who isolates his six children from society.

• Guiteau’s dodgy argument to the bank manager about the dent left in the wall by the paperweight: “Well, that was clearly a throw performed by a right-handed man, and I am a lefty.” Macfadyen channels much of the dim enthusiasm of his Tom Wambsgans character on Succession, and it gives this show the same comic lift.

• Already hard at work installing potential members of Grant’s next Cabinet, Conkling floats the secretary of the interior gig to Garfield in the bathroom. “I’m hardly qualified for that job,” says Garfield. To which Conkling retorts, “You own a fucking farm, don’t you?” 

• It may be a bit much, but crosscutting Garfield’s stirring convention speech with Guiteau furiously chopping up wood is what we in the business call foreshadowing. 

• There’s not even five minutes of screen time between Guiteau hearing of the new Republican nominee (“Who the hell is Garfield?”) to him wearing a Garfield campaign pin.