In Death by Lightning, the new Netflix miniseries helmed by Mike Makowsky of Game of Thrones fame, President James Garfield and his assassin, Charles Guiteau, are opposite poles of the national character, forever united through one of those lurid, violent spectacles for which we Americans have such an enormous tendency and talent. In lesser hands than Makowsky’s, the converging twain of Garfield, portrayed by venerable dramatic wingman Michael Shannon, and Guiteau, played by Succession’s Matthew Macfadyen, might sink into lazy archetypes, producing a cleanly cynical story about how the worst of us is ever hurdling into bloody collision with the best of us. It is Makowsky’s careful shading of what is “best” and “worst” in the American animal that rescues Death by Lightning from any tedious moralism. It is one of the few truly outstanding originals that Netflix has ever made.

For sheer Americanness, few historical figures top Garfield, briefly our 20th president. He rose from rural poverty to become a heroic Civil War general, an admired congressman, a champion of equality for African Americans, an enemy of political graft, and the commander in chief. His life and career tell us the best possible story about ourselves, at least if you leave out the very end. Our worst image of ourselves, the one we fear to be as true and as compelling as our self-conception of limitless possibility and decency, tells us that there is nothing more American than getting senselessly gunned down by a fame-seeking psychopath.