Make more "Death[s] By Lightning"
On topping the Netflix charts, underappreciated history, and why social memory is so important to sustain creatively
Creator Mike Makowsky openly admits that “Death By Lightning” was a wildly improbable project. It’s not in any way obvious that the story of James Garfield’s election and sudden assassination would have commercial appeal today.
■ But it’s a good thing something so unlikely came into reality. The four-part miniseries is probably the best original content produced for Netflix in the last half-decade: Wonderfully entertaining and quite shockingly faithful to reality. The script takes a few narrative liberties and the characters often verbalize their motivations in ways that real people rarely do, but nothing about it is gratuitous or manipulative. It’s overwhelmingly faithful to the real historical record.
■ How can production companies and distribution services be encouraged to make more material like this? Aside from a few racy minutes (related to the assassin’s real time in a free-love commune) and a fair number of FCC-unfriendly words, the show would be truthful enough to screen to a high-school history class, yet it’s appealing enough that it briefly topped Netflix’s viewership charts.
■ Any form of memory is only as good as how it is used in the present. Individual human memories fade with disuse, but so do institutional memories: We have to tell worthwhile stories over and over (and put them to use in the present) or else their lessons get lost to the mists of time. Making the important memories relevant and appealing in the present is a challenge.
■ Stories like “Death By Lightning” serve a real public interest. Viewers are drawn in because it’s well-crafted and enticingly produced (Nick Offerman as a mediocre Vice President discovering his better inner character, for instance, is a delight), but the storytelling serves to revive the memory that bad politics can be (and have been) reformed with the right people driven by worthy principles.
