In the Netflix limited series Death by Lightning, James Garfield (Michael Shannon) attends the 1880 Republican National Convention to support James Blaine (Bradley Whitford) but, after a fiery speech that impresses the crowd, he reluctantly becomes the presidential nominee. A low-key, accessible campaign and strongly-held political positions begin a presidency cut far too short by the bullet of assassin Charles Guiteau (Matthew Macfadyen).
Awards Buzz continued a previous conversation with Mike Makowsky about this series and specifically whether it does indeed have a broad appeal:
“I don’t think anyone is wondering why we made it necessarily, I think more people are just astounded by the fact that the show somehow got made at all. The hope, right, is that people that do deign to click on a badge for a Netflix show about James Garfield, probably against their initial preconceptions about what they may or may not be interested in in terms of receiving stories. I hope that the show caters to the history wonks that know more about Garfield’s assassination than maybe even I do, but hopefully we can appeal to the other 98% of people who are readily convinced at the top of the journey that they do not care about James Garfield or Charles Guiteau. Hopefully I’ve provided reasons to care.”
“I think that the greatest compliment that you can hope to receive as someone who tells stories is when you’re able to help engender an interest or a fascination or curiosity where there was none before. With Craig Mazin, for instance, I was quite certain I did not care about Chernobyl. Then you watch five episodes of Chernobyl, and all of a sudden, you want to spend ten hours on Wikipedia learning everything that there is to know and read five books. I hope I’ve given people reasons to care about this subject that I think definitely merited a closer examination.”
Watch the video above to hear about trying to stick closely to actual documented dialogue and whether he’d be interested in exploring any other presidential history for future projects.
Death by Lightning is streaming on Netflix.
