Death by Lightning review: The Netflix drama offers entertaining performances from Michael Shannon and Matthew Macfadyen, but suffers from rushed storytelling.
In Netflix’s latest dive into historical catastrophe masquerading as tragic comedy, the miniseries Death by Lightning, will focus on how President James A. Garfield’s short but significant term was cut short by the deranged Charles Guiteau. Adapted from Candice Millard’s acclaimed non-fiction book, the series has all the prestige hallmarks – a stellar cast (Michael Shannon, Matthew Macfadyen) and backing from Game of Thrones creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss.
Yet despite all its technical sheen and mesmerizing performances, the four-episode political drama cuts off oddly, a dazzling flash of promise that dissipates too quickly, leaving the audience with the feeling that the substance is severely undercooked in the narrative execution.
According to Collider, The series would not be what it is without its central performances. Michael Shannon brings a surprising depth of compassion and complexity to James A. Garfield. He is the unwilling, good man thrust into the nation’s highest office with a sincere dedication to civil service reform and battling the period’s widespread corruption. His political battle against the spoils system and his dream for a greater America provide the spine of the tale.
Likewise, Macfadyen as the mentally deranged assassin Charles Guiteau is an exercise in rattling restraint. Rather than barking like a lunatic, he gives us a chillingly believable narcissist whose grandiose delusions become deadly after he believes he’s been slighted by the government. Both Times Square and Ballet Mécanique are definitive performances by artists of the highest caliber and when these two extraordinary actors share even a few brief scenes, it electrifies the room.
Yet the very brevity that allows the series to have a tight focus ultimately becomes its undoing. With only four episodes, the drama speeds through Garfield’s volatile ascent; the political fights, the assassination, and the tragic fallout. The intricate, sleazy post–Civil War American political landscape which Garfield was frantically trying to clean up, seems drawn in rather than drawn out.
Crucial political and personal story lines are hurried, not allowing viewers to fully process the scope of Garfield’s vision and the pervasive institutional problems he confronted. Although the plot conforms to historical facts, it seems to be moving along a highlight reel, thus depriving the momentous events of their authentic emotional and intellectual weight.
The tragic thing about the Garfield story is not just the bullet but the subsequent, excruciating medical malpractice that resulted in his death months later—a detail beautifully and painfully unpacked in the source material.
The series nods to this, but its truncated format means the horror and absurdity of the medical ignorance doesn’t fully register. It’s in these pivotal, enduring moments that a genuine political drama finds its voice – revealing the systemic failures that magnified a personal tragedy.
Death By Lightning is a casualty of its brevity. It’s an effective (albeit superficial) flashback to a chapter in American history largely forgotten, and the work of its two stars makes it unforgettable.
But a story of this scope involving a president’s assassination, political corruption and the tragic crossroads of American determination requires more than a boiled-down treatment.
As report says, Beautifully shot and superbly acted, it’s less like a finished, fully resonant drama and more like a powerful, introductory prologue, a brilliant flash in the dark that leaves you wanting the narrative equivalent of a full tempest.
Death by Lightning is a show that glistens with stellar acting and pristine production values but doesn’t quite grant its narrative the depth it merits. But Michael Shannon and Matthew Macfadyen give strong performances that humanize and energize the limited four-episode format that does not allow the political and emotional strands to fully unravel.
What might have been a deep dive into ambition, tragedy, and systemic collapse, instead comes across as a beautifully staged synopsis of a much bigger narrative. Ultimately Death by Lightning isn’t just gorgeous and intermittently stirring but cuts too suddenly, leaving its viewers haunted, not by what has been seen, but by what’s been left unsaid.
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Today we break down on How Death by Lightning turns out both beautiful and at times touching but it runs out too soon. It is thus that his viewers are unsettled, not for what they see, but what goes unsaid.
Discover where to watch Dancing With the Stars 2026 live, check DWTS cast, premiere times, voting info, and streaming options. Don’t miss any dance action!
Catch Dancing With the Stars season 34 live, this new season created a buzz among the dance lovers with its premiere on September 16, 2025. This 20th-anniversary season will air at 8 pm on ABC and later available on Disney+ and new episodes drop every Tuesday at 8 p.m. ET. Pacific viewers can watch at 8 pm and Central viewers catch it at 7 pm local time. Its premier performances are featuring classic dances including tango, salsa and cha-cha while all the 28 contestants compete for the Mirrorball Trophy.
There are several platforms to catch Dancing With the Stars 2025. You can watch it on official channel ABC at 8 pm and 7 pm Central. You can stream this show on Disney+ as it airs concurrently on it. For a live streaming, use ABC app, Hulu Live TV, Fubo TV to watch your favorite dance show.
All the episodes are available of the entire season on Disney+ and Hulu to catch it later. But if you are interested in a live show then watch it right away on Disney+ and catch the premiere of 16th September on Hulu to watch your favorite celebrities in their dance forms. It means the premiere is available on 17th September on Hulu.
Dancing With The Stars season 34 cast announced on Good Morning America September 3, 2025. There are 14 couples – celebrities with professional partners including Hilaria Baldwin author and business owner, teamed up with Gleb Savchenko & actor and musician Corey Feldman dances with Jenna Johnson. There are more celebrity-dancer pairs listed below noted by the ABC.
The DWTS season 34 is back with the familiar faces including Carrie Ann Inaba, Bruno Tonioli, and Derek Hough will judge again. Performances are scored by these judges every week and the show co-host by Julianne Hough and Alfonso Ribeiro again. The competition will also get tricky because viewers can vote for their favorite couple.
| Celebrity | Professional Partner | Celebrity background |
| Jen Affleck | Jan Ravnik | Influencer and reality star (star of The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives) |
| Hilaria Baldwin | Gleb Savchenko | Wellness entrepreneur and author (host of TLC’s The Baldwins and lifestyle author) |
| Jordan Chiles | Ezra Sosa | Olympic gymnast (silver & gold medalist) |
| Baron Davis | Britt Stewart | NBA All-Star and entrepreneur. |
| Alix Earle | Val Chmerkovskiy | Leading social media personality (lifestyle/fashion content) |
| Dylan Efron | Daniella Karagach | Producer and content creator (co-star/producer of Netflix’s Down to Earth with Zac Efron) |
| Corey Feldman | Jenna Johnson | Child-actor turned musician (star of The Goonies, Gremlins; celebrating 50-year career) |
| Danielle Fishel | Pasha Pashkov | Actress (best known as Topanga on Boy Meets World) and TV director |
| Elaine Hendrix | Alan Bersten | Actress (The Parent Trap, Dynasty), model, and singer |
| Scott Hoying | Rylee Arnold | Grammy-winning singer (member of Pentatonix, win more than one Grammy Awards) |
| Robert Irwin | Witney Carson | Wildlife conservationist and TV presenter (son of Steve Irwin) |
| Lauren Jauregui | Brandon Armstrong | Singer-songwriter |
| Whitney Leavitt | Mark Ballas | Reality star (Secret Lives of Mormon Wives) and social media personality |
| Andy Richter | Emma Slater | Comedian/actor (longtime sidekick on Conan) |
The new addition to this season is Jan Ravnik who danced with Taylor Swift in her tour era. This season’s backup dancers are Carter Williams, Onye Stevenson, Jaxon Willard, Hailey Bills.
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It’s the 20th anniversary of Dancing With The Stars but there is nothing new or surprising. It returns as in its usual format, judges will score weekly on the dancer’s performance and elimination by audience vote. So, it’ll be the DWTS you know and love.
The Dancing With The Stars dancing show is returning with new faces and talent, fans will be excited to see their favorite stars on a live show. This dance show will air on ABC and Disney+ and you can also catch it later on the ABC, Disney+, Hulu app. Viewers can vote during the live broadcast via online on the ABC site or SMS with the celebrity’s first name to 21523 ( U.S., U.S. territories, or Canada).
Stranger Things may be popular, but iconic series like Dark, Game of Thrones, The Vampire Diaries, Lucifer & Fringe left deeper, lasting legacies.
If you’ve been watching tv for the last ten years, you’ve definitely had several heated discussions about which supernatural thriller really tugs at your heartstrings. The conversation always seems to get brought up—especially when someone tries to claim Stranger Things as the definitive sci-fi/horror juggernaut.
But here’s the thing a lot of fans are beginning to realize: Stranger Things, for all its nostalgic warmth and attractive production value, pales in comparison to the show that preceded it. Allow me to explain why series such as The Vampire Diaries, Game of Thrones, The 100, Dark, Lucifer and Fringe have established legacies that are and will be miles beyond that of Netflix’s darling creation.
Stranger Things landed just in time for the right cultural wave. It was nostalgia for the ’80s at a time when that style was making a comeback, but repackaged it all in Spielbergian goo and added a dash of supernatural mystery to keep us guessing. The numbers are certainly staggering 404.10 million viewing hours for all four seasons in the first half of 2025— but that’s where we have to separate true artistic accomplishment from commercial success.
“Popcorn entertainment, enjoyable once, does not really have any depth.”
The above quote is just stating what Stranger Things is as opposed to what it pretends to be. You watch, you smile, you move on. Yet Dark, which boiled an incomprehensibly elaborate time-travel narrative down to three seasons — keeps an 8.9/10 on IMDb, thanks to its philosophizing and character work.
Dark expected its viewers to pay attention and to grapple with paradoxes, and to ponder deeply whether indeed humans can exercise free will within a system dictated by an immutable notion of causality. Stranger Things sometimes fakes aspirations like that, but it mostly clings to emotional beats and ’80s nostalgia.
When The Vampire Diaries made its debut back in 2009, a lot of viewers wrote it off as ‘Twilight for television.’ Those who stuck around after the first ten episodes broke above something entirely different. This was a show that knew how to generate chemistry between characters — the kind where it wasn’t possible to just root for one couple because every romantic pairing had real emotional stakes.
The early seasons (especially 1-3) are truly amazing, and more importantly, they understood something that Stranger Things frequently forgets: audience will forgive you for screwing with the narrative if they’re emotionally invested in the characters doing the screwing.
Damon Salvatore from TVD was such an iconic character because the show let characters be morally ambiguous. They can be horrible at one point and then sympathetic at another, like real people. That nuance, that unwillingness to make anyone just a villain or just a hero, is missing in Stranger Things, where characters pretty much fall into neat little categories.
The Originals, a spinoff series, was very popular and, in the opinion of many fans, was better than the original show in terms of story telling, characterisation, and general “watch-ability”.
The final season of Game of Thrones was a dumpster fire. The hurried pace, the way characters acted out of character, the feeling that everyone’s elaborate six-season journey suddenly hadn’t meant anything—yeah, it was a letdown. But here’s the thing: Game of Thrones changed the way the entire entertainment industry thinks about television. It demonstrated that elaborate, political, morally grey fantasy narratives could draw and hold a global audience.
Prior to Game of Thrones, fantasy was consigned to black-and-white dualities. In the wake of its success, all the big streaming players started snapping up big-budget fantasy projects. How the show shaped the way we watch television, the way we discuss stories online, the way we share fictional worlds?—That’s immeasurable.
It established appointment viewing in the streaming era. It made fan theory-crafting a mainstream activity. It inspired academic discourse about storytelling and character arcs.
Want to see what it’s like when a show actually respects its viewers? Watch Dark. This German show did something almost unprecedented: it developed one of the most densely packed narratives in all of science fiction television — in just three seasons and 26 episodes.
The Show Plot & Storyline is pretty simple: kids disappear in a small town. But what ensues is a treatise on free will, determinism, quantum physics, metaphysics and time’s cyclical nature. Even better, it managed to stay emotionally resonant. Despite the mind-bending complexity of the show, readers say that the emotional core was strong enough to keep them engaged.
Dark’s dialogue is exceptional—it’s a “study in itself,” and the writers toy with philosophical ideas, quantum physics, and engineering before boiling these concepts down into pithy, memorable lines. Contrast with Stranger Things’ incessant pop-culture references and eighties period dialogue that does your thinking for you instead of making you think along with it.
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The 100 began as a CW series that frankly shouldn’t be nearly as good as it was. It gained a 93% rating on Rotten Tomatoes by the time it reached its fourth season. The show was posing genuinely tough questions: How far will human beings go to survive? Is tribalism inevitable? Can we break cycles of violence? These are from the sorts of narratives that hug you for hours after you’ve seen them.
Where The 100 ultimately faltered was in its execution in the final seasons, most notably with divisive character deaths that didn’t feel consistent with what had been established in arcs. But even at its worst, the show was endeavoring to do meaningful stuff. It was attempting to communicate something about humanity and morality.” Much Stranger Things, by contrast, is frequently happy simply to entertain — without much commenting or consequence.
Lucifer may be the outlier here—a procedural about the devil himself running a nightclub—but it did something extraordinary: it cultivated such a passionate fan following that when Fox canceled it after Season 3, fans organized on social media and Netflix saved it for three more seasons. The series achieved international acclaim, with versions dubbed in Turkish, Japanese and German.
Why? Because Lucifer was about character-driven storytelling. It made its main character human enough that viewers could see themselves in a literal divine being. It had the good sense to realize the viewers probably cared more about the characters’ relationships than the who-killed-who of the week. That’s not to say Lucifer never stumbled as later seasons veered away from what made the show so exceptional but at its core it never lost sight of what kept people coming back.
If there is a tragedy in TV, it is that Fringe never received the mainstream acclaim it deserved even while, amongst many serious science fiction fans, it was considered the best sci- fi show ever produced. Moved to the notoriously low-rated “Friday night death slot” and fighting dismal ratings, Fringe gained a passionate fanbase simply because it worked, plain and simple.
Fringe currently has a 91% critical score and 80% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes — a “uncommon feat for a show that only got more complicated as time went on.” Its characters were real developed, its mythology was meticulously laid out, and its penchant for parallel universes and alternate timelines led to some genuinely “wow” moments that, unlike most of that sort of thing, really felt earned. Whereas Stranger Things sometimes comes across like it is dutifully ticking off plot points because Netflix knows what plays well to Gen-Z nostalgia audiences, Fringe actually trusted the smarts of sci-fi fans.
Here’s what it really takes to make Stranger Things different: purpose. Game of Thrones was purposely going to change the way television was made. Dark was purposely shaping a perfect narrative puzzle. The Vampire Diaries was deliberately constructing a multi-layered world. Lucifer was intentionally toting the human side of the supernatural. Fringe was consciously pushing the boundaries of what science could do.
Stranger Things, by contrast, is in on the joke — it’s selling nostalgia and entertainment. There’s nothing wrong with providing “entertainment value.” But it’s not the same level of art that lasts.
The recent Season 5 Volume 2 reviews are all you need to know. Fans are already comparing Stranger Things unfavorably to Game of Thrones Season 8 is literally the punchline to every conversation about awful television conclusions. Once you’ve become as despised as that, then you can admit that whatever Stranger Things was, it most certainly wasn’t what these other series achieved.
The above iconic series aren’t just better television, they are different television. They took risks. They trusted their audiences. They developed worlds and characters that became touchstones for whole generations of viewers. Stranger Things is comfortable being popular. These shows were deemed important. And that’s the difference — that difference, above all else, is why Stranger Things will never beat them.
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