Manhunt review: Apple TV Plus' conspiracy thriller is dead on arrival

April 14, 1865, is inarguably one of the most fateful dates in U.S. history. That’s the day President Abraham Lincoln attended a performance of Our American Cousin with his wife, Mary. Midway through the show, John Wilkes Booth fatally shot the President, hopped on stage, yelled the infamous line “Sic semper tyrannis!” (“Thus always to tyrants”), and hobbled out of the theater. Apple TV+’s miniseries Manhunt, which premieres March 15, traces the fallout of Lincoln’s assassination, all the while wanting to give viewers a comprehensive portrait of the political unrest that teed up Booth’s actions—and that of those who were left to pick up the pieces of a Union in mourning and in tatters.

The first episode of Manhunt rightly focuses on the events at Ford’s Theater in D.C. For anyone who’s ever wanted to see Booth (Anthony Boyle) pick up his mail at the theater, fret over the last seconds before he fired a shot into Lincoln’s head, and even how he fled on horseback soon thereafter, this TV adaptation of James L. Swanson’s Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase For Lincoln’s Killer delivers. Only, the miniseries refuses to merely tell that tale—or to tell it in any kind of chronological order. The show haphazardly scrambles its timeline so much that increasingly necessary title cards like “30 minutes before the assassination” begin littering the screen at the start of every scene. Similarly, helpful ones like “Booth’s hotel room” and “Pennsylvania, a free state” eventually also end up suggesting that, narratively at least, Manhunt will require quite intrusive handholding—which becomes all the more distracting when no title card arrives and you’re left wondering why this one setting, why this one timeframe needs no geographic or chronological marker.

The shuffling back and forth is designed so that we follow Secretary of War Edwin Stanton (Tobias Menzies) in his attempts to wrangle Booth to justice. We also get a broader picture of the political turmoil that had immediately (and not so immediately) preceded Lincoln’s assassination. It offers Manhunt a chance to stage many a strategic meeting with Lincoln (Hamish Linklater) about slavery, the Union, Reconstruction, and the like—all in the months leading up to that fateful evening at the theater. The Union was at a precarious moment when Lincoln was killed (a night when two of his cabinet members were targeted as well). And Manhunt aims to show how Stanton’s search for Booth can’t be disentangled from the political maneuvering that took place in Washington (and the South).

This results in the show feeling intentionally fragmented. When it focuses on Boyle’s Booth, Manhunt is quite captivating. Here is a portrait of vanity and glory, of self-aggrandizement and self-pity. In this telling, Booth cannot see beyond the infamy he’s searching for in wanting to become a symbol of a resistance that may have been more splintered than he first imagined. His delusions of grandeur are neatly juxtaposed with the political chaos he unleashed. Boyle does a careful job giving textured complexity to a pathetic grandstander, a man who was too high on Shakespeare and Poe to see himself as anything but a hero of a country betrayed by Lincoln and his ilk.

Similarly, Menzies handles himself well enough as a Lincoln supporter who takes it upon himself to carry on his legacy as best he can—especially once his successor begins undoing much of what the president had hoped to accomplish to better usher in Reconstruction. All but unable to delegate anything to anyone working for him (including his own son), Stanton’s doggedness ends up feeling like an earmarked character trait constantly flagged by the show to better explain why he’s the focus of so much of this story. Such zeal is what eventually leads him to track down George Sanders, a self-described titan of U.S. industry who may have had some involvement in the Lincoln plot and yet who wears such suspicions with impunity. In one of the show’s most laughably jaw-dropping scenes, Stanton witnesses Sanders waving a gun at him: “I could fire this in Manhattan in broad daylight and nothing would happen to me,” he says, a line of dialogue that all too bluntly yanks us out of the late 19th century and forces us to have flashbacks to the 2016 election—and the 2020 one as well.

But if there is one element of Manhunt that best encapsulates why this handsomely mounted and often thrilling miniseries falters, it is Linklater’s portrayal of Lincoln. This was always going to be a tricky performance, especially as it is his absence which is supposed to drive the very plot of the show: In history and in specific moments in the show, it is the vacuum he created which fuels the many plots of Manhunt. But in insisting on peppering all too convenient flashbacks on any given episode, Manhunt makes Linklater’s Abe a continued presence throughout. And in many ways, the actor’s committed take on this oft-impersonated president is quite spot on. The makeup (and that beard) may be a tad distracting but you can’t deny that Linklater is trying to give you LINCOLN in bold capital letters, with all the oratory affectations you’d expect. It’s an interpretation more fitting for a taped PBS Great Performances broadcast than for a prestige take on Reconstruction-era America.

That leaves the actor in a bit of an island given that no one else around him is doing anything remotely similar. Not Lili Taylor, who plays Mary, his wife. Not Brandon Flynn, who plays Stanton’s son. And not even the likes of Patton Oswalt and Matt Walsh, who both leave their comedic beats behind here to better ground their respective characters (investigator Lafayette Baker, who helped Stanton in his search, and Samuel Mudd, the doctor who aided and harbored Booth). Menzies and Boyle similarly anchor their characters in a naturalistic tenor, with no fanciful accents or affectations. And so, even as he’s being historically accurate to what we know of the 16th president, it’s outright jarring when Linklater is onscreen. Such lack of modulation across performances belies the very fractured sensibility that runs all through Manhunt.

At once wanting to be a light-footed conspiracy thriller about the titular search for Booth and a story of political intrigue contemporary audiences are encouraged to see as all too timely in a post-January 6th world, Manhunt fails to cohesively bring its many thematic and narrative strands together. This is historical fiction at its most facile, too self-righteous to be persuasive about the historical parallels it’s trying to illustrate and too listless to make watching it feel like little more than required AP History homework.

Manhunt premieres March 15 on AppleTV+