Each episode of Murdaugh: Death in the Family begins with a disclaimer: While the Hulu miniseries is “inspired by actual events,” it emphasizes that “certain parts have been fictionalized solely for dramatic purposes” and shouldn’t be taken as a reflection “on any actual person or entity.” That industry-standard catchall, presumably insisted upon by lawyers, sets an uneasy tone of polished reality that hovers over the entire show. The series, created by Michael D. Fuller and Erin Lee Carr, and based on a true-crime podcast, positions itself as the definitive retelling of Alex Murdaugh’s infamous 2021 murder of his wife Maggie and son Paul in rural South Carolina. But Murdaugh seeks to do more than just that. It aspires to be a character portrait. A multipart saga. A drama.
These ripped-from-the-headlines shows saturating the streaming landscape tend to go in one of two directions. They can be low-budget affairs with camp casting and bad acting befitting the Lifetime movies they so often actually are. Or they can be prestige productions with big-name stars that span multiple episodes—think HBO’s 2022 The Staircase or Hulu’s own The Dropout from that same year. This is obviously the territory that Murdaugh wants to occupy, with its requisite Oscar winner in Patricia Arquette as Maggie and some truly incredible hair and makeup work done to transform the rest of the cast into the ruddy Murdaugh clan. But while the performances are strong (particularly Arquette) and the structure admittedly clever, I haven’t been able to shake a sense of unease that I’ve felt while watching. It’s all too … recent. Too fresh. And it feels somehow disrespectful of everyone involved, even if the Murdaughs were a deeply flawed family. Sure, I’ve been entertained, but maybe that’s the problem: turning this kind of story into entertainment at all.
The sixth of the show’s eight episodes, available on Hulu today, marks the climax of the series. “June 7th” follows Alex (Jason Clarke), Maggie, and Paul (Johnny Berchtold) on the day of the murders. I covered the Murdaugh story and its impossibly complex web of lies and deaths as a reporter extensively at BuzzFeed News. I watched each day of the trial and wrote more than two dozen pieces, which is perhaps what made watching their final minutes reenacted here feel especially surreal. There’s Paul texting a friend with movie recommendations. There he is with another friend’s dog—video of which was ultimately instrumental in the conviction of Alex because it captured his voice in the background, proving Alex had been on the scene. It all seems so mundane and quotidian—except we know what’s coming.
Mother and son’s deaths are quick but brutal. Paul is shot in the stomach, then the head, with the camera panning away to spare us the most graphic images. When Maggie runs over to investigate, she too is shot suddenly in the leg. As she raises a hand in a futile attempt to defend herself, she’s shot again, then finally twice more in the head.
What we don’t see—for now, at least—is the shooter. That’s a decision made presumably to keep some air of mystery and dramatic stakes in the final two episodes, but it feels right. Instead, we see the version of reality that Alex wanted the world to believe. There he is sitting with his elderly mother, watching a game show and eating ice cream (something done later to create an alibi). He then returns home and tries to find his family, before stumbling upon their bodies. We know it’s all a performance, which is what makes it so sickening. He’s acting for the responding sheriff’s deputy and for us, shedding crocodile tears for the family he just slaughtered. This is all just another lie for him. As Maggie told him coolly in their final scene together, “I don’t believe a single word coming out of your mouth. All I hear is noise.”
Much as the prosecutors did at his murder trial, Murdaugh makes clear that Alex’s actions were motivated by his desire to do something—anything—to find reprieve from the storm that was about to hit him. “It’s starting to feel like I’m locked in a room and the walls are getting closer,” he tells his brother in the episode’s opening minutes. Alex was just days away from a court-ordered inspection of his shady finances as part of a civil suit over Paul’s involvement in a boat crash that killed a young teen girl. Then there was word that Alex’s actions on the night of that incident—his attempts to silence witnesses in a bid to protect his son—were to be investigated as a potential obstruction of justice. Maggie, too, appeared to be about to divorce him, something that would surely draw more scrutiny on the house of cards on which his fortune had been made. Then, finally, there was his law firm’s chief financial officer confronting him that very morning about money he’d stolen from clients. Everything was about to come tumbling down. If only he had more time. Or better yet, more sympathy.
Nothing in Murdaugh paints Alex as anything less than a monster. You can see why Clarke wanted the role enough to executive produce the series, along with Arquette and others. Alex is a drug addict and a drunk. He’s abusive to sex workers and hits on wildly younger women. He is brazen and entitled. He is disgusting. Clarke effortlessly captures Alex’s sociopathy, even if his accent does slip in and out of his native Australian. He’s an actor playing an actor.
So why did I find myself bristling while watching Murdaugh? It can’t just be its recentness, as I had no such issue watching Arquette in Showtime’s Escape at Dannemora back when it aired in 2018—just three years after the deadly prison break in upstate New York that it dramatized. Hell, The Dropout was airing before Elizabeth Holmes had even been sentenced.
No, my central problem comes back to the disclaimer that starts each episode and its promise of dramatization. Murdaugh’s problem is its overdramatization. Are we really to believe that Paul and Alex had a meaningful conversation about the meaning of life just hours before the murders? That Maggie and Paul had another such deep exchange just minutes before? Even for a true-crime drama, everything about the series and its various arcs just feels too neat, too packaged, too produced. As the show works overtime to be a prestige piece of television, it has polished itself into something that no longer feels authentic. Worse still, its reliance on melodrama feels exploitative and indignified, both to the dead and to the family’s surviving son Buster, played here by Will Harrison.
Ultimately, then, Murdaugh is operating in a manner that’s almost akin to its antagonist, painting yet another vivid story it wants us to accept. But it is just that: a story. “There’s what’s true and there’s what’s not and a whole bunch in between,” Alex tells his Buster in an upcoming episode. “But the only real truth in this world is what you can get others to believe.”
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.yahoo.com ’
