'Death by Lightning': Netflix's Hit Garfield Assassination Show, With Mike Makowsky | Prestige TV

0:10Oh, hello. Welcome back to the Prestige TV podcast feed. I'm Joanna Robinson. We have a very special sort of mini episode for you today. We've got the showrunner, creator of Netflix's Death by Lightning, Mike Makowsky is here to talk about this incredible Netflix show that has been, a lot of people have been talking about it, burning up the charts on Netflix. This is, if you haven't seen it, this is a show about, it's a four episode miniseries about the assassination of President James Garfield. Michael Shannon plays Garfield. Matthew McFadden plays Charles Guiteau, who assassinated him. And it is really compelling watchable television.

0:50Since this came out a little while ago, a couple weeks ago, we just sort of talked about the whole series. So there are, if you consider history spoilers, there are spoilers for history. We talked about a lot of choices, including some that are specifically happened in the finale. So if you haven't seen it yet, I really urge you to go watch it. It's an incredible show. You should really watch it. And then come back. But if you've already seen it, let's go now to our conversation with Mike McGasky. This summer, FanDuel is the best place to bet on goals. Including equalizers, balls, headers. Every goal is worth more on FanDuel.

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1:57Heinz, Kraft, and Oscar Mayer. Rob, what's your ideal cookout scenario? First of all, I want you on the ox. I trust you with that sacred responsibility to pick our music. I'm going to have to man the grill, and I'm going to need like a copious amount of condiments. I need every possible fix-in imaginable. Well, make sure to top your burger with only the best. Heinz, ketchup, and Kraft singles. And you know, it's not a cookout without Heinz ketchup and mustard. Different vibes, same ingredients. We all know it's not a cookout without Heinz, Kraft, and Oscar Mayer. Shop at your local retailer. Let me start by asking you, I'm always fascinated by length of projects, especially on something like Netflix, where the seasons can sort of expand and contract.

2:34This is for, you know, episodes. Was there ever a version of this project that was a feature film length, since you've worked in that arena before? You know, I always felt like the story was potentially a little too expansive to be a feature film. I did initially write it as a six episode limited series, all cards on the table. And for both creative reasons and also, frankly, to get the show across the finish line at all to get greenlit, it just needed to be sort of condensed to its current form, which was four episodes. I meant to ask this question. I was going to ask this question later, but this is convenient.

3:15I'll ask it now. Was there ever an impulse to do Guiteau's trial since it was such a outlandish piece of theater itself? Yeah. I mean, for those who don't know, Guiteau was one of the first insanity defenses in our country. And essentially his pitch was, I may have shot Garfield that didn't kill him. The doctors killed him, which is correct. Kind of what your show says, too. Yeah. Yeah. And the trial was such a farce in many ways. The only lawyer in America that would ever agree to represent him was his poor patent law, patent lawyer brother-in-law, George, who hated him and had no criminal defense experience.

4:04and Gato spent most of the trial berating him. And yeah, I mean, it was a real tantalizing prospect and set piece. And I wrote a whole trial episode and ultimately what I realized, because the trial took place after Garfield's death, that just doing like a weird Charles Gato power hour after losing Garfield as this counterweight uh it felt imbalanced uh you know obviously there's i think part of me that wishes that i could have shown the trial but i you know as with so many of the things that we unfortunately couldn't fit into four hours uh i i hope that this provokes people who are curious to go on wikipedia or read candace millard's book destiny of the republic that i adapted or any of the other really fascinating literature written about Garfield and Coteau.

5:04The Wikipedia rabbit holes are endless for this particular story. I love my impulse always when I'm watching sort of an adaptation of a moment in history that I don't know anything about. And the impulse to go on Wikipedia while you're watching, but again, not want to spoil yourself by history. I mean, we know where this is ending and how, but sort of what are the steps along the way? but you're like, oh, I just want to, I'll just wait. I'll wait until the end and then I will go down all the rabbit holes, you know? It very much reflected my experience reading Candace's book for the first time, just to sort of get it out of the way.

5:39I knew nothing about James Garfield aside from, I think I was mildly aware of the fact that he'd been assassinated vis-a-vis Stephen Sondheim, let's say. But - I was going to bring that up for sure. I was at the buy two, get one free table at my local Barnes & Noble. And I needed a third book. And this is absolutely true. It is not apocryphal. I'm sure I can procure the receipt. This was in like 2018. And I needed a third book. And I picked up this book about the Garfield assassination. And I read the back cover. And I was just like, I know nothing about this. But I would love to be on Jeopardy one day.

6:19And I should educate myself, right? And I finally, you know, picked up the book and read it. And I ended up reading it in one sitting and I was just completely and utterly blown away by pretty much all of the details surrounding this poor man and his assassination. and I feel like I had to continue every five pages or so jumping over to Wikipedia. Like, hopefully, you know, like, and because I couldn't believe that this shit was true. I just, I could not believe that that convention actually happened. Right, exactly. Or that Chester Arthur, like, I knew nothing about Chester Arthur. Roscoe Conklin, all these.

7:09yeah yeah yeah exactly yeah nick no i will say offerman is was the only one of the of the main actors in the show to uh successfully grow out his full facial hair uh those mud and chops are all him he was walking around budapest for five months with those mud and chops well i feel like only he could pull that off and like your day-to-day walking around the street um thank you for saying steven sondheim before i did so i didn't have to be the first one to say it i will come back to assassins. But, um, I, I was curious in terms of like reading, reading through this book, um, what were the moments that leapt off the page to you as sort of like, this is cinematic in and of itself.

7:49Like this is just going to be electric. And then what were the more, how on earth do I make this easily digestible, like this political nuance or, or these sort of maybe in some other adaptations, drier conversations, like how do I keep them alive? Like, what was the thing that you were like, this is going to be a cakewalk and then this is going to be really tough to adapt? Well, yeah, speak to the first point. It really starts with that convention, right? You know, 1880 Chicago Republican National Convention. And what happens for those who have not watched the show yet is Garfield, James Garfield, who was this, who I think Candace does a really, really amazing job at presenting this.

8:38this, this, him is one of the great what ifs in, in American history. Yeah. This progressive hero, this, this man born into abject poverty who literally falls upward to the highest office in the land, ostensibly against his will. Uh, a war hero, a, an outspoken advocate for civil rights and racial equality and universal public education and civil service reform. just truly the best man for the job and who allegedly doesn't even really want it his name is not in the ballot in 1880 when stepping into that convention uh he's there to nominate a spoiler candidate uh and his speech is so powerful and presents such a strong vision for the future of our country while also grappling with the thorniness of the past.

9:37That some guy stands up in the rafters and shouts, we want Garfield, which was a sort of weird moment. But after a 36-round deadlock among the delegates, people start looking to other candidates because no one's reached a quorum. and it's very clear to everyone there that that garfield exhibits a lot of the raw qualities of leadership that the nation had really been starving for at this particular juncture in history and he's nominated against his will he he he tries to shut it down and ends up receiving overwhelming support. So for me, you know, it's the situational absurdity of that massive set piece was just incredibly exciting to me.

10:34Like there's just so much bound up in that and having these figures like Roscoe Conkling and James Blaine and Chester Arthur circling around Garfield, what it means for Garfield to step up and give that speech to begin with. This man who claims he doesn't want it, but you don't give an Obama in 2004 speech. Right. If you don't kind of want it. I love this. I'll come back to that second part of the question, but I do want to divert and say, you know, after I watched your show, I did the Wikipedia rabbit holes, But then I also guzzled up everyone sort of like fact versus fiction, like what this show got right versus like sort of what it what it embellished for dramatic effect and stuff like that.

11:21And most of them are like, wow, this is way more factual than this stuff usually is like way, way closer to what actually happened. um obviously there's rhetorical updates which we will get to but um i i thought it was so interesting that some people were saying hey garfield was way more of a political operator than it seems like he's not just like a farmer like he was you know a career politician for a long time before he did this but what i what i loved about your adaptation is at the end you've got this moment when garfield says to his wife like i knew what i was doing when i walked to that podium i wanted them to know me so you you have this sort of like um forgive me this is a weiss and benioff uh production so this sort of like john snow i don't want it like character at the beginning but the end he has this sort of like but did i kind of want it and i was just wondering sort of where you land on on garfield's psychology and giving that speech well there's a little bit of ned stark in him as well i think yeah yeah and um uh and like ned stark unfortunately he doesn't make it.

12:25But, you know, it's interesting. I think in sort of positioning it as a parallel journey between Garfield and his assassin, who on the face of it, these two men couldn't be more different from one another. And one succeeds, falls upward, while the other just fails miserably over and over again. But what was incredibly fascinating to me was that like the middle of that Venn diagram, like what do these two guys actually have in common? And what do a lot of men in this political era have in common? Is the ambition, the desire to matter. Again, Garfield doesn't step up on that stage unless he wants people to know him.

13:17that is also Goteau's governing ethos, right? Like he wants to matter. He wants to be recognized. He wants to be remembered. And I think it is that ambition that actually makes them a lot more similar than we might assume at the start of the journey. But in Goteau's case, it is very blatant. In Garfield's, there's a bit more of a latent quality that I kind of want to tease out over the course of the series that, you know, he is not a pure lawful good. Right. It's it's fascinating. And Michael Shannon's performance is so good. Yeah. And there's nothing I mean, you know, lawful good runs the risk of feeling simple or easy.

14:04There is nothing simple about Michael Shannon. I think that that was part of the draw of casting him is you can always tell that there's something simmering under the surface with this guy, even when he is projecting the most noble version of James Garfield. Are you looking for support in your weight management journey? ZepBound Terzepatide may be able to help. ZepBound is a prescription medicine used with a reduced calorie diet and increased physical activity to help adults with obesity or some adults with overweight who also have weight related medical problems to lose excess body weight and keep the weight off.

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16:02or some adults with overweight who also have weight-related medical problems to lose excess body weight and keep the weight off. ZepBound is approved as a 2.5, 5, 7.5, 10, 12.5, or 15 milligram injection. ZepBound contains terzepatide and should not be used with other terzepatide-containing products or any GLP-1 receptor agonist medicines. It is not known if ZepBound is safe and effective for use in children. Don't share needles or pens or reuse needles. Don't take if allergic to it, or if you or someone in your family had medullary thyroid cancer, or if you've had multiple endocrine neoplasia syndrome type 2.

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18:00Yeah. I mean, really on a, like a macro level, I knew that the buy-in was going to be incredibly tricky to get people to even want to engage with a story about James Garfield. You know, like I really, I, I like to align with the 2 % of history nerds that would readily, uh, consume James Garfield and Chester Arthur content. I like to believe that I'm one of those people, but I will say that almost no one else in my life is a part of that 2%. They're in the other 98%. And I spent, I mean, this was about a seven year process all in. I spent most of those seven years just like grabbing people by the lapels, like a crazy person being like, James Garth, like this is my Roman Empire.

18:48so you know part of the adaptation process is is giving it a little bit more of a contemporary engine a little bit more of a a sense of uh modern immediacy to it and that you know filters into the conversation about anachronistic language um i wanted it to feel modern uh Uh, uh, and, and, and it felt like rather than just presenting it as like a sheer docudrama that again, I think would only have really appealed to that 2%, like wanted to do everything in my power to kind of grab people by the lapels in the same way and be like, no, no, this is really cool and fun and weird and fucked up. I don't know if I'm allowed to curse, but you are, go for it.

19:35great. And a lot of that just has to do with the humor, too. And I remember reading Candace's book and laughing a lot. Not that the book is written with a lot of explicit levity or mirth, but there is that deeply ingrained sense of situational absurdity to these larger-than-life figures or, you know, Gato getting kicked out of a sex commune. Like, it's just to present, like, the most straightforward version of all of those scenes and characters, I think would actually be to do a disservice to who they are and why they mattered. Yeah, I love that. And I, for the record, I loved the contemporary language.

20:19I was curious about Garfield's speech. So there are moments of sort of making the language contemporary. And then were there certain things that felt sacred like we don't want to like how accurate was the the speech that he gave at the convention yeah i would say probably 70 30 to the actual language but it you know at times again to just make it feel a little bit more modern i kind of just updated some of the verbiage um because you know like any speech given in 1880 uh there was a little bit of a limited accessibility to, um, but, uh, but, but, but, but certainly, you know, Garfield was an incredible speechwriter and orator.

21:05And I tried to compromise as little as possible on his language and, uh, and, and the overall just, just intentionality behind it. Yeah. I'm curious. So you, you know, you mentioned this idea of getting this greenlit, getting this past the finish line. I'm curious about this sort of moment in period adaptations that we're in, you know, when you have something like the Gilded Age on HBO, when you've got, you know, what Stephen Knight is doing with Peaky Blinders into sort of like House of Guinness. Like, what do you think is so appealing right now to this kind of, you know, we're not doing, we are, we're still always doing Jane Austen.

21:48Don't worry, There will always be Jane Austen new period pieces. I just got an email about the new sense sensibility today. Like it's always going to be Jane Austen, but like this sort of like down and gritty, muddy, cursing sex, like, uh, adaptation kind of, uh, era that we're in, you know? Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, I've, I've, I've watched both of those shows and liked them quite a bit, but I really can only speak to my own journey. And all I can say is there was not like a ready made market for the James Garfield show. Like when I first told my agent I wanted to adapt this, this book about James Garfield as a TV show.

22:27He looked at me like I had three heads, like I was just totally fucking insane. And we got a lot of no's before we ever got to yes, including from Netflix, the fine folks at Netflix who eventually agreed to make the show. I mean, it was it was it was a really, really difficult journey. And the the the question that we got back most often from anyone that we presented the script to or the book to was sure. But who the fuck cares about James Garfield? Which then just kind of gave us that mandate to to push all the harder to to do that lapel grabbing. when so you know i will i will admit and say uh if someone says hey there's an adaptation of of the life and death of james garfield and gateau my stephen sondheim assassin's love aside which again i will come back to that is not necessarily grabbing my lapels and then i started reading the cast list and i was like michael shannon's and this matthew mcfadden's and betty gilpin's in this shea wiggum's in this like all my favorites are here this is incredible i'm so excited i was like astounded and excited about this.

23:37Um, was there, I mean, everyone's incredible. Nick Offerman's great. Bradley Whitford's great. Everyone's fantastic. Um, was there a performance though, among these great performances that particularly sort of changed your understanding of these characters that you've already spent years and years and years with? And you saw one of these actors or any of these actors pick it up and say, Oh, there's something even more here that I, that I, you know, that I realized. Yeah, I mean, all of them brought, you know, just an incredible amount of passion and intellectual curiosity to their parts and did way more research on their individual subjects than I probably did, like reading multiple books, just which is amazing.

24:21You know, it's what you want and what you hope for. Definitely Betty Gilpin, though, read more than anyone else, including a full compendium of all of the letters written between James Garfield and Lucretia Crete, his wife. Lucretia is such a fascinating character. I mean, she was only the second first lady ever to have attended college. And in fact, she attended this local university in Ohio where she met her husband and she was the editor of the school paper. And he was the night custodian mopping floors in order to pay his tuition and you know every bit his uh intellectual equal uh but you know given the time that she's in she can't even vote for her husband you know she and and i i think especially when you have an actor that's as strong strong as Betty and as emotionally attuned as well.

25:19Like, like, I feel like Lucretia really came to life in a way that I didn't necessarily expect. And we spent a lot of time talking about that last scene between her and, and Gato and what that should really represent. And, and, and what I love about Cree is, and it's, it's, it's kind of a bummer, but, you know, all of the men in this show are governed by ego to some extent. Like they believe that the, uh, the benchmark of, of, of whether or not their lives were successful is that future generations will talk about them. And the last question that Garfield ever asks on his deathbed, both in real life and in the show is, do you figure my name might have some place in human history, even on his deathbed this is the central concern for him and crete says yes a grand one but the grander one still in human hearts and you know you can see it in betty's eyes it's like she's sort of disappointed by her husband's question like it's but she also doesn't know how to do anything other than to give him what he wants in that moment which is acknowledgement that like yeah of course history is going to remember you uh which we all know watching the show history did not remember james garfield right and or or if they did they remember him as a very obscure footnote in like assassination lore but she gets to have that conversation with gateau at the very end where you know she really kind of like calls out the men in this era for like like like why do they care so deeply about this um the women in this era know no better than to think that their names are going to be etched in the annals of american history and you know it's just they've nothing in their lived experience has shown them that history gives a fuck about them in this era but what she can do the power that she does have is to deny that to Gateau.

27:25It's a great scene. It's a great moment. I really loved it. I also was completely electrified by sort of this closed door scene between Gateau and Garfield when Garfield is sort of taking all comers into office hours, essentially. And Gateau comes in and sort of talks to him. That scene, I'm always fascinated by historical adaptations that try to recreate, or not try to, successfully sort of imagine behind closed doors conversations. So sort of like, what was that as, as a sort of a creative challenge for you? This sort of these two men alone in a room behind a closed door. So it's really like their, their heat moment in so many ways.

28:08Like they have very, very few scenes together and that is their real one dialogue scene together. Uh, uh, Mike Shannon and Matthew McFadden didn't get to know each other super well on this production because usually when there was a Garfield block, Matthew would go home to London and vice versa. Um, so, and, and this, this has also had the benefit of being, uh, I believe Matthew's second to last day of shooting. So the very end of the journey, uh, Goteau gets to finally meet the wizard. Right. Right. And, you know, historical record is pretty light. We know that Goteau was able to meet for about five minutes with Garfield at the White House because he just kept showing up every single day, day in and day out.

28:52Garfield, like all presidents in his era, took open office hours. So eventually any constituent could, you know, meet the chief civil servant in our country, which is obviously absurd. Wild. By today's understanding. When Matthew sat down, I think none of us were expecting the level of emotion. Even when I wrote the scene, I didn't necessarily think of it as an emotional climax to a journey. The dialogue is pretty much unchanged, but this is just the difference between an actor reading the lines and an actor just embodying the role. Matthew just burst into tears as soon as he saw Garfield. And I don't know if that was planned or if it was just like the he had spent the preceding four months begging every single day to meet Garfield, both as an actor and as a character.

29:54Yeah. And I think that that's sort of like a cute visceral about like that was all Matthew. And that's the reason that people talk about that scene. It's not the writing. It's it's it's it's Matthew's face. And Michael, you know, in real time, Garfield doesn't know how to deal with him. Like, you can see it in Michael's eyes because we cross cut it. It's all genuine. Like, Michael's like, oh. Oh, no. Yeah. And I have to imagine, you know, I do think in real life, I'm sure that it was not as an emotional of a moment for either Gateau or Garfield. But no, it really is the centerpiece of the show, which was not necessarily what I even thought was going to be the scene that people would be talking about when I first wrote it.

30:49It's so good. And that's all just, it's just a testament to those two guys. Matthew's performance is you know again everyone's amazing but one of my favorite things about all of these episodes is sort of the moment when someone is talking to Gato and they realize that they're dealing with someone sort of unhinged or unwell you know what I mean and they're just sort of like oh let me back away from the or how do like what kind of kid gloves do I need to put on to like get out of this conversation as as quickly or as elegantly as possible um and and and again in those sort of like factor fiction articles that I was devouring.

31:25And they were all like, yes, you could get this close to a president, to a secretary of state. You could bang on their door. You could walk up to them in the street. That's just what it was like, you know, if you were in DC at that time, which is completely wild. There was no secret service during this period. I believe the secret service was only ever established 20 years after that when McKinley was assassinated. Garfield never, ever thought that anyone would ever want to kill him. It was just not, it didn't even occur to him. There had been one presidential assassination prior to this one, 15 years before Lincoln had been assassinated by a Confederate sympathizer days after the Civil War, but that was very bound up in sort of just like the heat of wartime.