Someone, or possibly a number of people, at Apple TV+ really liked their American history classes. The streamer is constructing slightly canon of TV shows and movies built around classic American historical figures, themes, and moments. So far we’ve got the superb comedic tackle the poet, Dickinson; Greyhound, a Tom Hanks–in-a-WWII-submarine film; the Will Smith escape-from-slavery movie Emancipation; the speculative “what if the space program, but more!” show For All Mankind; the second Band of Brothers sequel, Masters of the Air; and, later this spring, Michael Douglas (!) as Benjamin Franklin within the limited series Franklin. Books written for uncles for the win, yet again!
This weekend, Apple adds one other Civil War–themed show to this growing stable, premiering the primary two episodes of Manhunt, a seven-episode miniseries adaptation of James L. Swanson’s 2006 book concerning the 12-day seek for John Wilkes Booth and the opposite conspirators behind the plot to assassinate Abraham Lincoln in 1865. Manhunt stars Tobias Menzies as Edwin Stanton, the secretary of war and Lincoln’s close friend, who coordinated the search; Anthony Boyle, recently the rookie-to-hero navigator Harry Crosby on Masters of the Air, doing a liquid-eyed heel turn as Booth; and Hamish Linklater, a really tall actor, as Lincoln, mostly in flashback.
Looking at that little list of Apple TV+ historical shows, it strikes me that probably the most enjoyable of them are those that allow themselves to get slightly sideways of their subjects: Dickinson resurrected the spirit of Emily Dickinson without trying too hard; For All Mankind’s first season was concerning the Cold War, without quite being about our Cold War. Likewise, the perfect parts of Manhunt are the parts that get on the unreal highs and lows of those few weeks between Robert E. Lee’s April 9 give up at Appomattox, Ruination Day, and the top of April 1865.
Imagine this era from the Union perspective, which is where this show’s sympathies land. You just won the Civil War, final-fucking-ly, and everyone seems to be celebrating within the streets. It’s warm! The trees are budding! The president’s heart is lightened; the primary lady, who has been in mourning for a son who died a number of years back, is smiling. The Black individuals who’ve been recently freed are flush with it and are watching, with a good amount of caution, to see what’s going to occur next. Then, into this carnival scene, literally leaping from above onto the stage, comes murder—and latest waves of uncertainty.
This show manages to invoke this sense of perilousness and adrenaline when it could possibly get past its two worst compulsions: to invoke contemporary resonances at any time when it gets a likelihood, and to pack intimately through copious and confusing flashbacks. I believe the individuals who wrote this show desired to do loads greater than Swanson’s book to elucidate what the death of Lincoln did to the fledgling idea of Reconstruction. This, as Jill Lepore argues in her review of the show within the New Yorker this week, is a brave and good move, but in its execution, it results in loads of clunky “As you know, I am very committed to aiding the freedpeople”–type flashback interactions between Lincoln and Stanton. As for the “it’s just like Trump, for real” reflex that folks who write about history across domains can’t currently appear to avoid indulging, evidence of that’s in all places. Take the scene where Stanton is asked by a reporter if Americans ought to be afraid that Booth had “weakened their democracy,” and he responds: “Booth is an anomaly. This is America. We replace our presidents with elections, not with coups.” Ugh! We get it.
A unique scene illustrates how well the show can execute the step to the side that makes good history shows work. In the pilot, the conspirator Lewis Powell is played by Spencer Treat Clark (who, apologies, will not be quite handsome enough—Powell was a violent and racist one that was also, because the famous Alexander Gardner portrait of him in prison reveals, a classic “daguerreotype boyfriend”). Powell is assigned by Booth to kill Secretary of State William H. Seward. The group hoped to eliminate the president, vice chairman, and the secretary of state in a single night, with the intention to create a succession crisis, while also, in assassinating Seward, getting rid of one of the strongest advocates for abolition and civil rights inside the administration. (The man assigned to kill Vice President Andrew Johnson in his hotel room, George Atzerodt, got drunk, got nervous, and never even made the attempt.)
Powell stands outside Seward’s stately house and asks his confederate, the young pharmacist and guide David Herold (Will Harrison), why this guy must die. “He’s the secretary of state,” Herold replies, a bit shocked. “Which state?” Powell asks, then shrugs, knocks on the door, and brutally assaults William Bell, the young Black servant who answers. We see the scene from outside, from Herold’s point of view, as Powell moves through the home, lit by candles and lamps, battering down Seward’s sons and servants, and Seward’s daughter screams out the window: “Help us! Murder!”
The details of this assault on Seward’s house should not perfectly faithful to the record, but in witnessing Powell’s forcefulness, you actually get on the shock of it: the intrusion on the domestic scene, the suddenness. As Swanson writes in his book, Powell’s assault on the Sewards’ house, while it didn’t achieve its goal (Seward survived), was seen on the time as—to place it in modern terms—a lot. It was one thing to murder the president, but to assault a person’s whole family, in addition to multiple bystanders? (Swanson writes that “the indiscriminate viciousness of his co-assassin’s assault shocked and revolted” Booth when he examine it while in hiding, on the lam.) The show does great at conveying that excessiveness; it just must be slightly unfaithful to the historical story to achieve this.
The amplification of the character of Edwin Stanton, the secretary of war—who was something of a micromanager but didn’t do nearly a lot hands-on investigating within the course of this manhunt as his televisual counterpart does—is one other success. As Stanton, an asthmatic man living in pre-inhaler times who’s compelled to push beyond the boundaries of his body to see the job done, Tobias Menzies exudes a lonely sense of singularity. He’s fascinating to look at, even if you happen to don’t know anything concerning the original Stanton. Menzies is a superb selection, not least because he has probably the most remarkable brackets on either side of his mouth—lines which have, as time goes on, deepened, in order that they almost completely bisect either side of his face. Kudos to Manhunt for not making him grow the historical Stanton’s big, huge beard; we want to see every bit of that weariness.
The show would have been higher off as a story if it had 25 percent less compulsion to instruct. And that, in a nutshell, is the peril of AP U.S. History TV. Imagine an alternate Manhunt by which your entire thing were, as a substitute, made up of scenes similar to these: In a dream sequence that opens the second episode, Stanton imagines how he would have brought Booth down, if he had taken Lincoln up on the invitation to accompany him and Mary to Ford’s Theatre that night. (Stanton and Ulysses S. Grant, amongst others, declined the second set of tickets.) Surely, Stanton’s dreaming brain imagines, he would have looked to the precise at exactly the right moment and seen the derringer emerge from between the curtains. He would have grabbed Booth’s arm; he would have wrestled Booth to the bottom. But as his dreaming self batters Booth’s face, Booth starts laughing uncontrollably, and in a start, Stanton wakes up. He’s on the War Department, and he must get back to work.
Credit : slate.com