How ‘Death by Lightning’ Made James Garfield’s Assassination Feel “Shakespearean”

Mike Makowsky (Bad Education) was not looking for his next television series when he wandered into the Barnes & Noble at The Grove in Los Angeles — he just wanted a few books at reasonable prices. Rooting around in the bargain bin, the Emmy-nominated Death by Lightning creator found two books that sparked his interest. But as this was, again, the bargain bin, the deal was buy two, get one free. Makowsky fancies himself a bit of a historical nonfiction fan, so he added Candice Millard’s Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President to his basket. And why not? If it sucked, it was the free one anyway. Instead, Makowsky read Millard’s very serious book about the assassination of President James A. Garfield in one sitting. “I was blown away by it, and I was laughing a lot, even though the book is not written with explicit levity or mirth,” Makowsky tells The Hollywood Reporter. “What Candice did really well was she found that parallel structure between the president and the assassin, and she was constantly weighing the two men in contrast with one another,” he continues. “I felt like that journey of seeing these two sides of the American experiment and the ways in which they kind of contradict but also eerily complement each other, like why one man succeeds, falls upward to the presidency ostensibly against his will, while the other desperately courts greatness and just fails at every conceivable turn — just bangs his head against the wall over and over again until he essentially loses his mind.” That would be Charles Guiteau, played in Death by Lightning either perfectly by Matthew Macfadyen (Succession) or far too charmingly, depending on which Reddit thread you read. (Count me in the “masterfully” camp, though the only acting Emmy nomination went to Nick Offerman, who well deserves it for his boozy, brutish portrayal of Garfield’s vice president and successor in the big office, Chester A. Arthur.) “It felt Shakespearean,” Makowsky adds. “I couldn’t believe that this story was still on the table, that no one ever tried to adapt it before.” Makowsky was the unlikely choice — his career plans never included adapting such a story. Had he known how difficult it would be turning Destiny of the Republic into Death by Lightning, those of us who didn’t pay attention in history class may have never known the story that led up to Garfield getting capped in the back by a total whack job who fancied himself and the short-lived POTUS friends. “We got the impossible show made,” Makowsky says of his own origin story. How did Makowsky convince Netflix to make a miniseries about the 1881 assassination of a guy who served all of 200 days in the White House? He didn’t — at least, not alone. After reading Makowsky’s pilot script — Death by Lightning was originally going to be a six-episode series, but he settled on four — Game of Thrones creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss boarded as producers. (Makowsky, by his own admission, is still “squatting” in their offices to this day.) And then Michael Shannon (Boardwalk Empire), Macfadyen, Offerman (Parks and Recreation), Betty Gilpin (GLOW), Shea Whigham (also Boardwalk Empire) and Bradley Whitford (The West Wing) joined the cast. Suddenly, Death by Lightning was a hot package, even if nobody understood what the title meant. Garfield (Shannon), as you now know, was not killed by lightning — he was shot in the back by an admirer/crazy person. The show title is borrowed from a Garfield quote, written in a letter to a supporter not long before the assassination. “Assassination can no more be guarded against than death by lightning, and it is not best to worry about either,” he counseled the concerned citizen. As it turns out, Garfield probably should have consulted a statistician on that one. Considering he was the 20th president and our 16th one, Abraham Lincoln, had been assassinated some 16 years earlier, the real odds of assassination were around 5.3 percent. Those odds would jump to 10 percent soon; the chance of death by actual lightning is about 1 in 138,000. It probably would have been worthwhile to attempt to guard against assassination. Makowsky says he “begged” Millard, a former editor and writer for National Geographic, for the rights to adapt her second book. Millard was either won over by Makowsky’s passion or annoyed into agreement by his persistence. Makowsky says he added the aforementioned mirth in Death by Lightning for “the other 99 percent of people who are quite confident they do not care about James Garfield himself — like, frankly, me at the beginning of this process.” Same, bro. Same. Makowsky’s “modern-day appliqué” brought in what he describes as the series’ “irreverent” and “contemporary weird” tone. And yes, that includes some dramatization — so sue him. (Not legal advice.) “Every writer who’s ever adapted any piece of historical material has to take certain liberties,” Makowsky says. “I would argue that most of the liberties I took were probably tonal ones. “I had a lot of fun writing the show, and I hope that that’s clear in the finished product, but I tried to really retain the spirit of the proceedings, even if I couldn’t necessarily portray it as faithfully as a docudrama,” he continues. “You have to make certain decisions at times, and everything was done intentionally,” Makowsky concludes. “I think our accuracy is pretty high.” Again, that might depend on who you read on Reddit. This story first appeared in an August stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.