I watched, ah, 'Death of a President' last night. Probably the only time I've actually stopped what I was doing and made a special point to watch TV since the last episode of Battlestar Galactica. It was quite heavily hyped, so I knew it would be a part of pop culture, or water cooler talk, if you like, and plus I'd heard some intruiging things about it, so thought I should give it a look.
To be honest, it was a big disappointment. It started out quite well, ratcheting up the tension towards the assassination, and then the footage of the murder itself was very well done. As a convinving documentary it was extremely well done, the footage of real people and real places were virtually seamless with the fiction. There were one too many shots of cars driving by hospitals, but real documentaries have that, too.
But once the assassination had actually taken place, I think the filmmakers missed a really important opportunity to make something great. What they decided to focus on was who was the assassin- it turned into a sort of less-than-compelling episode of CSI, looking at fingerprints and going into the history of suspects and trying to figure out who the assassin was. Which wasn't really great TV. None of these people are real, do I really care who gets caught and punished? Much more interesting to me was what would happen to America if Bush was shot? If the assasssin was Syrian, would they invade Syria? If it was just prior to the Presidential elections, would those elections be suspended? Before 9/11, many would argue that the most significant day in modern American history was the day JFK was shot. This event would undoubtedly have equally massive implications. Did the film look at any of them? Hardly. It was too busy talking about eight points of similarity found on a fingerprint. Yawn. To be honest it was pretty disappointing. It could have been a really important, even prescient, document of how American power is perceived from within and abroad. As it turned out it was a second-rate murder mystery with a lamely predictable conclusion.
If you missed it, I wouldn't worry too much about catching the rerun.
This is a 
Top review dude... I no longer feel bad for forgetting it was on.
Maye you didn't watch the same thing I did. While I agree that it did focus on the "8 points of reference" on the fingerprint, there was a bloody good reason for that.
The entire thing post-assassination raised some really strong issues regarding evidence, assumption, and pre-conceptions. The way they had several suspects, but went with the Syrian, the way that they had a suspect, and then found evidence to prove it was him, rather than using the evidence to find a suspect, the prosecution, the way he was found guilty on what was - at best - circumstantial evidence, all of it was relevant, and had resonances with oooh, I dunno, Guantanamo Bay? Patriot Act? (And the extension into Patriot 3 following the assassination) Homeland Security?
Particularly when the final twist about the killer came out (I'm not going to ruin it for anyone) definitely made you (well, me) think "oooh, shit" as it all came clear.
Personally I thought it was a bloody good piece of documentary/film-making, and the hype that surrounded it was actually the worst bit of the entire thing.