Death by Lightning Review

As someone who's declared Charles Guiteau to be his favorite presidential assassin since I read Sarah Vowell’s ASSASSINATION VACATION back in 2009, I braced myself to be disappointed with Death by Lightning. My thoughts:

- Overall, very good to great!

- All of the cast was great but Matthew Macfadyen as Guiteau was off the charts fantastic; he played Guiteau's naive mix of wonder & righteousness perfectly - even knowing what his fate was to be, I was left heartbroken when he blew his big chance to discuss the future with Garfield

- It's incredible how they held your attention with "guy seeks Federal position in DC" for such a long time when a presidential assassination was lurking over the entire thing

- My only complaint would be how rushed the final episode was - suddenly Garfield’s shot and then like 20 minutes later the series is over

- Although to be fair about that I'm relieved they refrained from making any more gruesome death theater than they did; Garfield’s agony was for the most part swift & offscreen

- ALTHOUGH I am disappointed no time was spent on Guiteau defending himself at his trial, a performance which drew more & more people to the Court House every day to watch as if a sporting event event

- The last episode felt rushed when they tried to shoehorn the metal detector/antiseptic/air-conditioning stuff from Candace Millard's book in there; tho again, I think I'm okay with their decision since if you start pulling any of those threads then you hafta have a series of repetitive scenes to validate the point of each one

- It’s rare you finish a limited series wondering if it could’ve used one more episode, but then again I think that woulda mostly been 45 minutes of watching Garfield die, so 👍

Macfadyen better win all the goddam awards for this!