A New Show to Fill the AP U.S. History–Sized Hole in Your Life

Someone, or maybe a few people, at Apple TV+ really liked their American history classes. The streamer is building a little canon of TV shows and films built around classic American historical figures, themes, and moments. So far we’ve got the excellent comedic take on 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 in the limited series Franklin. Books written for uncles for the win, yet again!

This weekend, Apple adds another Civil War–themed show to this growing stable, premiering the first two episodes of Manhunt, a seven-episode miniseries adaptation of James L. Swanson’s 2006 book about the 12-day search for John Wilkes Booth and the other 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, lately the rookie-to-hero navigator Harry Crosby on Masters of the Air, doing a liquid-eyed heel turn as Booth; and Hamish Linklater, a very tall actor, as Lincoln, mostly in flashback.

Looking at that little list of Apple TV+ historical shows, it strikes me that the most enjoyable of them are the ones that allow themselves to get a little sideways of their subjects: Dickinson resurrected the spirit of Emily Dickinson without trying too hard; For All Mankind’s first season was about the Cold War, without quite being about our Cold War. Likewise, the best parts of Manhunt are the parts that get at the unreal highs and lows of those few weeks between Robert E. Lee’s April 9 surrender at Appomattox, Ruination Day, and the end of April 1865.

Imagine this period from the Union perspective, which is where this show’s sympathies land. You just won the Civil War, final-fucking-ly, and everyone is celebrating in the streets. It’s warm! The trees are budding! The president’s heart is lightened; the first lady, who has been in mourning for a son who died a few years back, is smiling. The Black people who’ve been recently freed are flush with it and are watching, with a fair amount of caution, to see what will happen next. Then, into this carnival scene, literally leaping from above onto the stage, comes murder—and new waves of uncertainty.

This show manages to invoke this feeling of perilousness and adrenaline when it can get past its two worst compulsions: to invoke contemporary resonances whenever it gets a chance, and to pack in detail through copious and confusing flashbacks. I suspect the people who wrote this show wanted to do a lot more than Swanson’s book to explain what the death of Lincoln did to the fledgling idea of Reconstruction. This, as Jill Lepore argues in her review of the show in the New Yorker this week, is a brave and good move, but in its execution, it leads to a lot 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 people who write about history across domains can’t currently seem to avoid indulging, evidence of that is everywhere. Take the scene where Stanton is asked by a reporter if Americans should 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 different 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, is not quite handsome enough—Powell was a violent and racist person who was also, as 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 president, and the secretary of state in one night, in order to create a succession crisis, while also, in assassinating Seward, getting rid of one of the strongest advocates for abolition and civil rights within 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 needs to 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 house, 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 are not perfectly faithful to the record, but in witnessing Powell’s forcefulness, you really get at 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 succeed in its goal (Seward survived), was seen at the time as—to put it in modern terms—a lot. It was one thing to murder the president, but to assault a man’s whole family, as well as multiple bystanders? (Swanson writes that “the indiscriminate viciousness of his co-assassin’s assault shocked and revolted” Booth when he read about it while in hiding, on the lam.) The show does great at conveying that excessiveness; it just needs to be a little unfaithful to the historical story to do so.

The amplification of the character of Edwin Stanton, the secretary of war—who was something of a micromanager but did not do nearly so much hands-on investigating in the course of this manhunt as his televisual counterpart does—is another 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 watch, even if you don’t know anything about the original Stanton. Menzies is a good choice, not least because he has the most remarkable brackets on either side of his mouth—lines that have, as time goes on, deepened, so 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 need to see every bit of that weariness.

The show would have been better 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 alternative Manhunt in which the entire thing were, instead, made up of scenes such as 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, among others, declined the second set of tickets.) Surely, Stanton’s dreaming brain imagines, he would have looked to the right at exactly the correct moment and seen the derringer emerge from between the curtains. He would have grabbed Booth’s arm; he would have wrestled Booth to the ground. But as his dreaming self batters Booth’s face, Booth starts laughing uncontrollably, and in a start, Stanton wakes up. He’s at the War Department, and he needs to get back to work.