Manhunt review: Apple TV+ made another show for history-obsessed uncles.

Someone, or maybe a few people, at Apple TV+ really liked their American history classes. So far we’ve got the excellent comedic take on the poet, Dickinson; Greyhound, a Tom Hanks–in-a-WWII-submarine film; the Will Smith escape-from-slavery movie Emancipation; the speculative “what if the space program, but more!” show For All Mankind; the second Band of Brothers sequel, Masters of the Air; and, later this spring, Michael Douglas as Benjamin Franklin in the limited series Franklin. This weekend, Apple adds another Civil War–themed show to this growing stable, premiering the first two episodes of Manhunt, a seven-episode miniseries adaptation of James L. Swanson’s 2006 book about the 12-day search for John Wilkes Booth and the other conspirators behind the plot to assassinate Abraham Lincoln in 1865. Manhunt stars Tobias Menzies as Edwin Stanton, the secretary of war and Lincoln’s close friend, who coordinated the search; Anthony Boyle, lately the rookie-to-hero navigator Harry Crosby on Masters of the Air, doing a liquid-eyed heel turn as Booth; and Hamish Linklater, a very tall actor, as Lincoln, mostly in flashback. Looking at that little list of Apple TV+ historical shows, it strikes me that the most enjoyable of them are the ones that allow themselves to get a little sideways of their subjects: Dickinson resurrected the spirit of Emily Dickinson without trying too hard; For All Mankind’s first season was about the Cold War, without quite being about our Cold War.