In the late 19th Century, President James Garfield promised progress and reform – but four months after his inauguration he was shot. New series Death by Lightning explores his life and legacy.

In the year 1880, the US stood at a crossroads. Would formerly enslaved people finally enjoy full rights as citizens? Could an entrenched patronage system – the doling out of federal government jobs to party faithful instead of the most qualified candidates – be reformed? At the Republican National Convention in June, James Garfield addressed these questions, beseeching the nation to fulfill its promises to all. Hearing his eloquent speech, hundreds of delegates stood and roared in approval, before demanding that this congressman from Ohio be their candidate.

Garfield tried to refuse his party's nomination. He insisted he had no desire for the presidency. But the groundswell of support for Garfield – who'd risen to national office out of poverty, as Abraham Lincoln had, and performed heroics as a commander on the Union side in the Civil War – proved unstoppable, and in November 1880, he was elected the country's 20th president.

What happened next is among the most tragic chapters in the annals of presidential history: shot four months after his inauguration, Garfield eventually died from sepsis. In her best-selling work on Garfield, Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine, and the Murder of a President, author Candice Millard expertly recounts the story. The award-winning book was the basis of a two-part documentary, The Murder of a President, broadcast in the US on PBS in 2016.

Now Netflix plays host to an ambitious – and lavish – new adaptation of Millard's work. Death by Lightning, a four-part drama written by Michael Makowsky and starring Michael Shannon as James Garfield and Matthew Macfadyen as the man who shot him, Charles Guiteau. What might viewers take away from the show? "I hope it's a reminder that you don't have to have a big event to change the course of history," Millard tells the BBC. "In this case, the combination of one man's madness and another's ignorance and petty ambitions devastated an entire nation."

Long before he shot Garfield, Guiteau exhibited signs of mental instability, yet he was never treated nor confined in that era of rudimentary psychiatry. As for the arrogant physician who insisted on supervising the president's care after he was shot, Dr Wilfred Bliss scoffed at the latest antiseptic method for treating wounds, using unsterilised instruments and even his bare finger to probe the hole near Garfield's spine. Blame for the president's death can be laid firmly at Bliss's door, as Millard lays out in painful detail.

Screenwriter Makowsky picked Millard's Destiny of the Republic off a two-for-one sale table, took it home and read it in one sitting. He immediately envisioned a television drama. "I got the author on the phone, and at first she said no," he tells the BBC. "I had to persuade her to trust me with the project."

Makowsky could point to his previous experience dramatising true events. A true-crime film he wrote for HBO, Bad Education – about a larcenous school superintendent, Frank Tassone, from Makowsky's hometown of Roslyn, New York – won an Emmy award in 2019. Telling Garfield's story meant confronting an enduring historical "what if": had the promising president not been targeted by an assassin, what could he have accomplished? "He could have been one of our most remarkable presidents. He had a magnificent intellect. The fact that he's been relegated to an obscure footnote is a tragedy." Makowsky says.

Makowsky's crucial task was to sift through Millard's detailed dive into the history of the assassination and construct a narrative appealing to TV viewers. Destiny of the Republic includes sections on........

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