“Manhunt” explores the “what if” aspect of Lincoln’s assassination that affects the present.

Growing up, “Manhunt” creator Monica Beletsky wondered why the neighborhoods in her hometown of Philadelphia were so different despite being so close geographically, like no more than five or 10 minutes apart. Many large cities are decorated in this way, with working-class squares flanked by middle- and upper-class areas.

“I think it’s something I always had in the back of my mind. ‘Why is it like this?'” Beletsky asked in a recent Zoom interview. “I knew it couldn’t be because of people’s internal abilities. It had to be something more structural.”

ABC’s critical coverage of “Roots” evoked that nostalgic feeling, too. The replays that Beletsky watched when he was younger helped him begin to piece together how his father might walk in the world differently than he or his mother.

America’s shared history includes many personal histories, and some pieces of the puzzle have been hidden or reshaped. Some lost places would remain forgotten if there were too many people. Those need to be reconstructed in a fictional way with the intention of filling in the gaps left of course in the often told stories.

This was Beletsky’s opportunity and challenge with “Manhunt,” the Apple TV+ thriller exploring the quest to bring John Wilkes Booth (Anthony Boyle) to justice after he assassinated Abraham Lincoln (Hamish Linklater).

Instead of recreating the almost two-week horse race meticulously described in James L. Swanson’s bestseller, “Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln’s Killer,” Beletsky created a thriller that featured Lincoln’s Secretary of War Edwin Stanton (Tobias Menzies) as. both of a master detective and a man struggling to uphold his best friend’s political legacy.

Lili Taylor as Mary Todd Lincoln and Hamish Linklater as Abraham Lincoln in “Manhunt” (AppleTV+)Beletsky’s work in TV, including “Friday Night Lights” and “Fargo,” allowed him to see the power of introducing a voice to a story that is not usually represented yet helps explain the consequences of what he described as America’s “Sliding Doors” era. .

“It’s such a big thing for our culture,” he said. “If he had lived, what would our society be like today?”

“Manhunt” details what most Americans learn as part of elementary history class, but here’s a flashback anyway: About 159 years ago today, on April 14, 1865, Lincoln and his wife Mary attended a film production. “Our American Cousin” at Ford’s Theater in Washington.

As the Lincolns watched the scene unfold, Booth quietly crept into their booth and shot the president in the back of the head. Lincoln died a few hours later. Booth escaped, beginning a 12-day manhunt that ended with him trapped in a Virginia tobacco farmer’s barn, where he was shot dead.

The play’s final episode, “It’s Inappropriate,” shows that the ending coincides with the rapid deterioration of Stanton’s health as the stress of the hunt becomes too much for the chronic asthmatic to cope with. The name of the watch is derived from Booth’s last reported words: “Useless, useless, useless,” he is said to have muttered while looking at his hands.

Creating a narrative connection between the moment and Booth’s motivation allowed Beletsky to craft a moralizing monologue for Boyle to deliver, which also captures his arrogance and pettiness.

That much is to be expected from any historical drama. Beletsky, however, was well aware of how this point in American history is considered – and largely mythologized and sanitized.

“Manhunt” sat in development hell for almost 20 years before taking over the project. At one point, Harrison Ford was supposed to star in a movie adaptation of the book. From the beginning, Beletsky said, “I was looking to do something that went beyond what the show is on its face.”

First, he introduced what he didn’t want to do, which was to make Booth the main character. “I think that’s what many people tried before me,” Beletsky observed, but he did not want to glorify his white supremacy.

Reading more in history made Stanton a better choice as a hero. Beletsky found that in the hours between the assassination and Johnson’s inauguration the next day, the weight of everything fell on Stanton’s shoulders, from setting up the investigative apparatus to protecting Lincoln’s political power. “He was the de facto president for about 12 hours, and that struck me as a bit of a surprise,” he said, along with the chance to treat a historical event known as a pre-trial crime thriller.

“This is a true crime in American history, and I think that’s what makes it possible for a major studio to take on a project like this,” Beletsky added. “I could bring in viewers who weren’t just there to learn history but are there because they love the murder mystery. They just happen to see a show that takes place in the 19th century.”

Most people know the intimate details of Lincoln’s assassination. Beletsky, himself, admitted that he had no idea until he began working on the story that Confederate General Robert E. Lee had surrendered five days before Booth killed Lincoln. “I thought of Lincoln as a two-term president, but his inauguration was about a month before the assassination,” he said. “We basically lost his second term, and we lost the power he had by winning the war.”

“It was a great loss for our community and for our culture,” Beletsky continued. “Part of what I wanted to look at and explore with the show is: How did that affect our democracy, and how did that affect our society and our culture today?”

The answer is, in a word, Reconstruction – rather, the fact that Lincoln’s death ensured that it would fail before its full promise could be fulfilled. But that wasn’t a story Beletsky could easily sell to the studio; aside from Henry Louis Gates, Jr. had already directed a series of short documentaries for PBS a few years earlier.

Instead, Beletsky worked backwards from the transcripts of the trials of Booth’s associates – another surprise for him, he said – and, in doing so, obtained testimonies from free or formerly enslaved black people that he used to create characters who could speak for for them.

“There were about 10 prosecution witnesses in the case who, until now, have been left in the shadows,” Beletsky recalled. “It was a thrill for me to find them. It wasn’t like Black history was something I had to work hard to integrate into the story. It’s part of American history, and it’s part of the story.”

Lovie Simone in “Manhunt” (Apple TV+)One major character in “Manhunt,” Mary Simms (Lovie Simone), is based on a real person who once worked for Samuel Mudd (Matt Walsh), the doctor who treated Booth’s broken leg while on the run. Beletsky sustained the criticism by presenting Mary as having been present when Booth was at Mudd when, according to recorded history, she had not worked for Mudd for some time.

That’s the danger in dealing with a piece of history that has “a lot of sophisticated fans who like a lot of attention to detail and memorizing those details,” Beletsky admitted. “But all the experts I’ve talked to are really happy about it because they understand what I’m doing is not a Ken Burns movie.”

Besides, Beletsky said, a pair of Black girls named Louise and Letty, who were about 11 and 13 years old, were working for Mudd at the time of Lincoln’s assassination. Since they did not testify in the case, Beletsky used a large license to fill in the blanks through Mary, through whom he also acted out what it was like for a recently released person to receive a land grant from the government, but the new president of the country canceled it to appease the owners of the white land of the south.

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“We know more about Booth’s horse than we know about Mary Simms in the historical record,” Beletsky observed. “So that kind of tells you everything right there.”

He added: “That’s why it’s hard to hear sometimes some of the comments on the show are ‘Oh, I wish he’d done it as a movie,’ or ‘I wish he’d done it as one guy chasing another guy. ‘ . And part of my whole point in saying this is that I think stories after the Civil War are few and far between.

New episodes of “Manhunt” stream Fridays on Apple TV+.