Jill Lepore reviews “Manhunt,” a new television miniseries produced by AppleTV+, adapted from “Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln’s Killer,” by James L. Swanson.
John Wilkes Booth wasn’t the best actor in the Booth family: he was outshone by his father, Junius Brutus Booth, and by his brother Edwin. But John Wilkes was the most beautiful of the Booths, the handsomest man in all America, it was said: lithe and feline, with dark Fauntleroy curls and a leading-man mustache. “All you have is rage or self-pity,” Edwin tells John Wilkes, deriding his little brother’s hammy acting, in the lush and tense “Manhunt,” the new seven-episode series from Apple TV+.
In the series, Simms and her brother choose, inexplicably, to return to Mudd’s house in 1865 and Simms is in the house when Booth arrives; she hides his boot and later directs Stanton to its hiding place. Her testimony, elicited by Stanton, is crucial not so much to Mudd’s conviction as to the series’ interest in both racial justice and a happy ending.