Apple TV+ created another show for history-obsessed guys.

Someone, or maybe some people, on Apple TV+ In fact He liked his American history classes. The streamer is building a small canon of TV shows and movies around classic American figures, themes, and historical moments. So far we have the excellent comic version of the poet, Dickinson; Greyhound, a Tom Hanks movie on a World War II submarine; Will Smith’s film about the escape from slavery Emancipation; the speculative “what if the space program, but more!” show For all humanity; the second sequel to Band of Brothers, masters of the air; and, later this spring, Michael Douglas (!) as Benjamin Franklin in the limited series franklin. Books written for guys to win, once again!

This weekend, Apple adds another Civil War-themed show to this growing lineup, premiering the first two episodes of Hunta seven-episode miniseries adapted from 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. Hunt stars Tobias Menzies as Edwin Stanton, Lincoln’s secretary of war and close friend, who coordinated the search; Anthony Boyle, recently rookie yachtsman to hero Harry Crosby in masters of the air, doing a heel turn with liquid eyes like Booth; and Hamish Linklater, a very tall actor, as Lincoln, mostly in flashback.

Looking at that small list of historical shows on Apple TV+, it strikes me that the funniest are the ones that allow themselves to stray a little from their themes.:Dickinson resurrected Emily Dickinson’s spirit without trying also hard; For all humanityThe first season was about the Cold War, without being entirely about our Cold War. Also, the best parts of Hunt are the parts that address the unreal highs and lows of those few weeks between Robert E. Lee’s April 9 surrender at Appomattox, day of ruinand the end of April 1865.

Imagine this period from the perspective of the Union, which is where this show’s sympathies land. You just won the Civil War, final-fucking, and everyone celebrates in the streets. It’s warm! The trees are sprouting! The president’s heart is lightened; the first lady, who has been in mourning for a son who died a few years ago, He is smiling. The recently freed blacks are excited about this and are watching, quite cautiously, what will happen next. Then, in this carnival scene, literally jumping from above onto the stage, come the murders and new waves of uncertainty.

This show manages to invoke this feeling of danger and adrenaline when it can overcome its two worst compulsions: invoking contemporary resonances every chance it gets and presenting details through copious, confusing flashbacks. I suspect that the people who wrote this program wanted to do much more than Swanson’s book did to explain what Lincoln’s death did to the budding idea of ​​Reconstruction. This, like Jill Lepore argues in his review of the show in this week’s New Yorker, it’s a brave and good move, but in its execution, it leads to a lot of clunky, “As you know, I’m very committed to helping the freed” flashback interactions. between Lincoln and Stanton. As for the “he’s like Trump, really” reflex that people writing about history across the board these days can’t seem to avoid, there’s evidence of that everywhere. Take the scene in which a reporter asks Stanton if Americans should fear that Booth has “weakened his democracy,” and he responds, “Booth is an anomaly. This is America. “We replace our presidents with elections, not coups.” Yuck! We understand.

A different scene illustrates how well the show can executes the step to the side that makes good history programs work. In the pilot, conspirator Lewis Powell is played by Spencer Treat Clark (who, excuse me, is not handsome enough; Powell was a violent, racist person who was also, like the famous Alexander Gardner portrait of him in prison reveals, a classic”daguerreotype groom“). Booth assigns Powell the task of killing Secretary of State William H. Seward. The group hoped to eliminate the president, vice president, and secretary of state in one night, to create a succession crisis, and at the same time, by assassinating Seward, get rid of one of the strongest advocates of abolition and civil rights. within the country. administration. (The man assigned to kill Vice President Andrew Johnson in his hotel room, George Atzerodt, got drunk, nervous, and didn’t even try.)

Powell stands in front of Seward’s stately home and asks his accomplice, young pharmacist and guide David Herold (Will Harrison), why this guy needs to die. “He is the Secretary of State,” Herold responds, a little surprised. “Which state?” Powell asks, then shrugs, knocks on the door, and brutally attacks William Bell, the young black servant who answers. We see the scene from the outside, from Herold’s point of view, as Powell goes through the house, lit by candles and lamps, beating Seward’s children and servants, and Seward’s daughter shouts out the window: “Help us! Murder!”

The details of this assault on the Seward home are not perfectly faithful to the record, but witnessing Powell’s forcefulness, one really feels the surprise: the intrusion into the domestic scene, the suddenness. As Swanson writes in his book, Powell’s assault on the Seward home, while unsuccessful in its objective (Seward survived), was seen at the time as, to put it in modern terms, a batch. It was one thing to assassinate the president, but assaulting a man’s entire family, as well as several bystanders? (Swanson writes that “the wanton cruelty of his co-murderer’s assault shocked and revolted” Booth when he read about it while he was in hiding, on the run.) The program manages to convey that excess; You just need to be a little unfaithful to historical history to do it.

The amplification of the character of Edwin Stanton, the Secretary of War, who was something of a micromanager but who did not do as much practical research in the course of this manhunt as his television counterpart does, is another success. As Stanton, an asthmatic man living in a time before inhalers and who is forced to go beyond the limits of his body to get the job done, Tobias Menzies exudes a solitary sense of uniqueness. It’s fascinating to watch, even if you know nothing about the original Stanton. Menzies is a good choice, not least because he has the most notable qualities. supports on each side of his mouth, lines that, as time has passed, have deepened, so that they almost completely divide both sides of his face. Congratulations to Hunt for not growing the historic Stanton’s big, huge beard; We need to see every detail of that fatigue.

The show would have been better as a story if it had 25 percent less compulsion to instruct. And that, in a nutshell, is the danger of AP US History TV. Imagine an alternative Hunt in which everything was, instead, made up of scenes like these: In a dream sequence that opens the second episode, Stanton imagines how he would have floored Booth if he had accepted Lincoln’s invitation to accompany him and Mary to Ford’s Theater that night. (Stanton and Ulysses S. Grant, among others, rejected the second set of tickets.) Surely, he imagines Stanton’s dreaming brain, he would have looked to the right at exactly the right moment and seen the Derringer emerge from between the curtains. He would have grabbed Booth’s arm; he would have knocked Booth to the ground. But as his dreamy self punches Booth’s face, Booth starts laughing uncontrollably, and Stanton initially wakes up. He’s in the War Department and needs to get back to work.