MANHUNT
Edwin Stanton (Tobias Menzies) and a grieving Mary Lincoln (Lili Taylor).
Hamish Linklater as the lauded President.
TV
CSI: 1860s WASHINGTON DC
★★★★
OUT NOW (APPLE TV+) / EPISODES VIEWED 7 OF 7
SHOWRUNNER Monica Beletsky
CAST Tobias Menzies, Anthony Boyle, Lovie Simone, Hamish Linklater
PLOT After Abraham Lincoln (Linklater) is assassinated by actor John Wilkes Booth (Boyle), Secretary of War Edwin Stanton (Menzies) hunts down the killer.
ON 14 APRIL 1865, actor John Wilkes Booth, a Confederate sympathiser, shot President Abraham Lincoln in the head during a performance of Our American Cousin at Ford’s Theatre in Washington DC. The event is reconstructed in compelling detail in the first episode of Apple TV+’s Manhunt, but it’s to the credit of showrunner Monica Beletsky (The Leftovers, Fargo) that the rest of the show doesn’t feel anticlimactic. For Beletsky and directors Carl Franklin, John Dahl and Eva Sørhaug not only mount a gripping detective drama, but in the same breath deliver a knotty portrait of a country finding its feet in the aftermath of the Civil War.