Netflix’s Greatest Historical Epic With 90% on Rotten Tomatoes Takes Less Than 5 Hours to Binge

Netflix knows how to make history feel anything but dusty. Its best historical thrillers turn royal corridors, political rivalries, and forgotten scandals into gripping television, blending grand spectacle with the messy emotions that make the past feel surprisingly close. There’s something irresistible about watching ambition collide with duty, power unravel behind closed doors, and ordinary choices become extraordinary turning points.

If you’re ready for your next obsession, you should watch Death by Lightning. Created by Mike Makowsky and based on the 2011 nonfiction book Destiny of the Republic by Candice Millard, Death by Lightning stars Michael Shannon as President James A. Garfield, and Matthew Macfadyen as his assassin, Charles J. Guiteau. Critics praised the series, which holds a 90% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and it was nominated for several awards, including four Primetime Creative Arts Emmy nominations.

‘Death by Lightning’ Benefits from Outstanding Performances

Death by Lightning’s four episodes are all binge-worthy. The show excels by treating a forgotten American rupture as a living human collision rather than a history lesson. It places two men on parallel tracks that can only end in violence: James A. Garfield, the reluctant Ohio congressman who never sought the presidency, and Charles Guiteau, the deluded striver who convinced himself he had earned a place in it.

Michael Shannon plays Garfield with a quiet, almost disconcerting decency. He is a leader who would rather be home on the farm, who understands the spoils system and the unfinished business of the American Civil War, and who still believes the country can be better than the people currently running it.

Shannon’s Garfield listens more than he speaks, and when he does talk, the words feel earned rather than performed. Opposite him, Matthew Macfadyen makes Guiteau a study in the American hunger for significance. Guiteau is sweaty, grandiloquent, and always one step behind his own fantasies. He is funny until he is terrifying; the performance never lets you decide which is more dangerous.

The series understands that history is both comedy and tragedy. The political machine surrounding Garfield — corrupt bosses, drunken vice-presidential candidates, men who treat the government as a patronage system — is drawn with sharp comic timing, yet the laughter never undercuts the cost.

When the inevitable happens, the historical thriller doesn’t rush the aftermath. It lingers on incompetence, political maneuvering, and the simple fact that sometimes a man who might have done some good loses because another man needed to matter.

What remains is a clear-eyed wistfulness. Death by Lightning doesn’t claim Garfield would have solved the country’s problems. It only insists that the country lost the chance to find out, and that the man who took the chance was not uniquely monstrous but a recognizable product of ambition without restraint.

In that recognition, the series becomes more than a standard Netflix period drama. It’s a precise, unsentimental reminder that political violence is never as random as it looks, and that the people who commit it are often the ones who most need the story they are destroying to be about them.

‘Death by Lightning’ Strays Slightly from History, But Never Wanders Too Far

Death by Lightning sticks closely to the broad architecture of history while inventing the connective tissue that turns a sequence of documented events into drama. The central facts are sound. James A. Garfield entered the 1880 Republican Convention supporting John Sherman. Guiteau, a failed lawyer and one-time member of the Oneida Community, convinced himself — through a mix of delusion, self-importance, and political fantasy — that assassinating Garfield would secure him fame and vindicate his beliefs.

The underrated political thriller series departs where the record is thin, or the needs of storytelling are strong. Garfield is rendered more purely reluctant and unblemished than the historical figure, who was a seasoned Congressman with a more complicated private life.

Several elements of the series are fictional, including private conversations and confrontations. A drunken night out between Guiteau and Chester A. Arthur is pure fiction, yet a fun addition. The medical agony and the political aftermath are compressed, and Guiteau’s lengthy, theatrical trial is largely omitted. Character interactions — especially between Guiteau and the Garfield household — are heightened by irony and pathos.

These liberties serve the dual portrait. By heightening Garfield’s ordinary decency and Guiteau’s desperate theatricality, the masterpiece Netflix miniseries makes the collision feel inevitable without rewriting the outcome. It preserves the essential tragedy Millard documented: a president of genuine ability was cut down less by a single madman than by the medical ignorance and political culture that surrounded him.