“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 telli

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