The Stranger-Than-Fiction True Story Behind Netflix’s New Star-Studded Historical Miniseries
Netflix's Death by Lightning tells the shocking true story of the assassination of U.S. President James Garfield. Long before "parasocial relationships" became a common term, Charles Guiteau—a failed lawyer, aspiring preacher, and self-proclaimed political influencer—believed he was personally responsible for Garfield’s rise to power.
After the White House ignored his handwritten letters demanding an ambassadorship to Paris, Guiteau took his obsession to a deadly extreme. In the summer of 1881, he confronted Garfield at a Washington, D.C. train station and shot him in the back. Guiteau was convinced that he had just saved the Republican Party—and possibly the nation.
This story sounds like the perfect drama about obsession, ego, and delusion, and Netflix’s Death by Lightning delivers just that. The series transforms the strangest presidential assassination in U.S. history into a darkly humorous and bizarre character study.
Executive producers David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, known for Game of Thrones, collaborated with Mike Makowsky of Bad Education to explore how a single man’s desperate need for validation clashed with a political system already deteriorating from within.
The miniseries reveals how Guiteau’s deadly obsession and the corrupt political environment converged with catastrophic consequences.
Author’s summary: Netflix’s Death by Lightning chillingly explores Charles Guiteau’s obsession and its deadly impact on a fragile political system, blending dark humor with historic tragedy.
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