Edwin Stanton was Abraham Lincoln’s secretary of war, confidant and friend, as well as an asthmatic and a workaholic. In the wake of the president’s assassination, he led a 12-day search for the killer, John Wilkes Booth, trying to get ahead of Booth’s plans while coping with his own ill health. I think it’s a toss-up as to whether he or I, after getting through Apple TV+’s miniseries about his endeavours, ended up more exhausted.
There is a lot going on in Manhunt. There is the assassination and the cat-and-mouse chase itself, obviously. But we know (roughly) how that ended, so to add a sense of jeopardy and uncertainty, the timeline is vastly fragmented. We begin on the day Lincoln is killed, then cut to 30 minutes before, then 10, then five days, then 10 hours, and sometimes we take leaps of years. Usually these are clearly captioned but sometimes they are not, and that’s almost more confusing than captioning nothing at all.
