Death by Lightning, a new Netflix miniseries about the 1881 assassination of US President James A. Garfield, was created by Mike Makowsky after he stumbled upon Candice Millard's book Destiny of the Republic in a bargain bin at a Los Angeles bookshop. Makowsky, best known for Bad Education, found the parallel story of Garfield and his eventual assassin Charles Guiteau so compelling that he became determined to adapt it, despite acknowledging it was an unlikely and difficult project to get made.

The four-part series stars Matthew Macfadyen as Guiteau and features an Emmy-nominated performance from Nick Offerman as Chester A. Arthur, Garfield's vice president and successor. Makowsky, who is Emmy-nominated for the show, said he was drawn to the "Shakespearean" contrast between the two men's fates, and credited Game of Thrones creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss with boarding the project after reading his pilot script, which helped him secure Netflix's backing for what he called "the impossible show."