In one of their last conversations before his death, Abraham Lincoln (Hamish Linklater) declines to accept the resignation of his Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton (Tobias Menzies). The Civil War has just finished, Stanton points out, but Lincoln isn’t having it. “Your heart, it’s always been more in Reconstruction than it’s ever been in victory,” the president notes.
Apple TV+’s Manhunt is, on the surface, about the highly dramatic chase for Lincoln’s assassin in the days immediately following Lincoln’s demise. But as with Stanton, its real interest lies in Reconstruction. Long after Stanton’s cat-and-mouse pursuit of John Wilkes Booth (Masters of the Air‘s Anthony Boyle) has concluded, what lingers is the series’ portrait of a nation at a crossroads, and its reflection on the bitter compromises and hard-won triumphs of the era that resonate to this day.
Manhunt
The Bottom Line A thrilling, thoughtful snapshot of a nation in flux.
Airdate: Friday, March 15 (Apple TV+)
Cast: Tobias Menzies, Anthony Boyle, Lovie Simone, Will Harrison, Brandon Flynn, Damian O'Hare, Glenn Morshower, Patton Oswalt, Matt Walsh, Hamish Linklater
Creator: Monica Beletsky, based on the book by James L. Swanson
To get there, though, Manhunt begins by delivering on the breathless conspiracy thriller it’s packaged as. The premiere sets the clock ticking from the day of Lincoln’s death, and chronicles Stanton’s 12-day chase over seven hour-long episodes. While the identity of the killer is never in doubt — Booth, a semi-famous actor, leaps on stage in front of hundreds immediately after shooting Lincoln in the skull — the series delivers much the same excitement of investigation that this winter’s murder mysteries have. The first few hours see Stanton and his team methodically examining evidence, tracing clues, strategizing to ensnare or impede Booth in any way they can; one of their cleverest ideas is to ban the sale of horse feed in Maryland, where they suspect Booth went after fleeing D.C.
Meanwhile, as we follow Booth on his southward run toward the former Confederate capital of Richmond, we come to know him as neither a calculating mastermind nor a sadistic sociopath, but as that most pathetic of things: a small and petty man whose vanity makes him easy to manipulate and blinkers him to common sense. When an ally suggests he might be safer in Mexico, Booth reacts with offense. “I am not a symbol in Mexico,” he whines. “I am a symbol in Richmond!”
Still, his actions throw a country that had just been celebrating the end of conflict into a new haze of paranoia. “Has Booth triggered a new Civil War where we have to prepare for surprise attacks by civilians?” a journalist (Josh Stewart) asks. “What if Booth has weakened our democracy?” Although Stanton waves off the incident as “an anomaly,” it’s clear he, too, sees how high the stakes are. He works around the clock in defiance of his doctor’s warnings that the stress might aggravate his life-threatening asthma, and the pleas of a wife (Anne Dudek) who exists solely to fulfill the thankless biopic trope of “wife who begs her Great Man husband not to do the Great Thing.” Soon enough, he picks up on the threads of a much larger conspiracy that stretches from Richmond to Montreal, and implicates the highest levels of Confederate leadership.
Throughout, creator Monica Beletsky (adapting the book by James L. Swanson) weaves in flashbacks to days or years past for additional insights into the events of the story’s present; it’s a testament to the drama’s skillful editing that they rarely slow down the propulsive central plot. Some of these detours provide necessary context, mapping out how and why the Confederate plot took shape. Others flesh out characters who linger mostly on the sidelines, like a Black servant (Lovie Simone) who’ll prove essential to proving Stanton’s case or a soldier (William Mark McCullough) who’ll be instrumental in the end of the hunt for Booth.
But the meatiest of them revolve around long, impassioned conversations between Stanton and Lincoln about their hopes for reunification. Though Manhunt positions Stanton as the moral center — more so than Lincoln, who’s determined to enshrine the rights of Black citizens but also wants to “let the Confederate workers save face” by paying back slavers for the “value” they lost — Menzies never overplays his heroism. He emits the quiet confidence of a man who trusts his decency and competence to speak louder than any grandstanding will.
Unfortunately, the series is unable to humanize Lincoln with the same success. Between the heavy prosthetics required to turn Linklater’s face into a passable approximation of Lincoln’s, and the folksy sayings he’s tasked with delivering, Lincoln comes across as a genial cartoon.
Manhunt is no alternate-history fantasy, a la The Man in the High Castle or For All Mankind. Yet in listening to Stanton’s most ambitious plans, and the determination with which he goes about executing them, we can envision a timeline where he was able to prevail — one in which Confederate traitors might have been punished more harshly and Black citizens welcomed more decisively. In a particularly wrenching illustration of the future that was snatched away when Lincoln passed, a formerly enslaved woman receives a deed for 40 acres of land only to have the grant reversed days later under Lincoln’s less sympathetic successor, Andrew Johnson (Glenn Morshower). At the same time, to hear the show’s Confederate characters crow that they’ll “see the Southern way of life revived” thanks to Booth is to feel for a second the chill of a world in which the worst came to pass.
The glimpses of all these potential futures, in turn, lend weight to the show’s warnings about the present. Even when the allusions aren’t exactly subtle (“I could fire this on Wall Street in broad daylight and nothing would happen to me,” a gun-toting millionaire boasts), Manhunt earns them well enough to keep them from tipping over into smug self-importance.
The series ends on a tremulously hopeful note, as a voiceover notes that the Fifteenth Amendment, which codifies Black Americans’ right to vote, was finally passed five years after Lincoln’s death. But the feeling engendered by the overall series is one not of satisfaction, but of urgency and unease. Established history, Manhunt reminds us, always starts out as someone’s unsettled present. The series leaves with us the question of what, then, we must do today in order to ensure our own better tomorrow.
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