The path from podcast to true crime documentary to limited streaming drama has been well traveled in recent years, with mixed results for the fictionalized adaptations. If you’re into the true-crime stuff, odds are you’re familiar with the blood-soaked saga of the powerful Murdaugh legal dynasty, seeing as the sordid tale has been chronicled on multiple podcasts, in documentary series including “Murdaugh Murders: A Southern Scandal” (Netflix) and “Low Country: The Murdaugh Dynasty” (HBO Max)—and even a two-part Lifetime movie titled “Murdaugh Murders: The Movie,” starring Bill Pullman and Lauren Robek.
Now comes the Hulu limited series “Murdaugh: Death in the Family,” an occasionally engrossing but mid-level project that never really grabs hold of you. The performances are outstanding, but the production values are underwhelming, and the saga is stretched and padded to eight episodes when four or five would have been sufficient. This once-shocking story has been told so many times that “Death in the Family” doesn’t pack the same visceral wallop anymore–but even if you’ve never heard of the Murdaughs, you might find this to be a bit of a slog, as the show hops along the timeline, sometimes to the point of distraction, and dwells on too many subplots and secondary characters that stall out the dramatic momentum.
Jason Clarke is one of our best actors, and he disappears under an amalgam of prosthetics and Southern bluster as Alex Murdaugh, a scion of a prominent Lowcountry legal empire that ruled South Carolina’s justice system, with three generations serving as solicitor (the region’s version of district attorney) while also running a lucrative private firm. As per standard operating procedure in these projects, “Death in the Family” opens in medias res, with a panicked and grief-stricken Alex calling 911 to report his wife Maggie (Patricia Arquette) and youngest son Paul (Johnny Berchtold) have been shot on the family property. Cue the obligatory flashback to a seemingly idyllic interlude two years prior, with Maggie planning an elaborate shindig to commemorate Alex’s father, Randolph Murdaugh III (Gerald McRaney), receiving the Order of the Palmetto, the state of South Carolina’s highest civilian honor.
We get an early indication of how screwed up this clan is, how their priorities are so out of whack, when the rabble-rousing and hungover (or maybe still drunk) Paul comes roaring home in his pickup truck after a night of partying with a sizable tree branch stuck in the right front wheel well. Alex laughs it off, while Maggie only gently scolds her son before saying, “Hey, hey, hey, you. I’m glad you’re OK.” This is the way it is with the Murdaughs, as we repeatedly see—problems are ignored, wrongdoings can be rectified with phone calls and influence, mistakes are never acknowledged, and facts can be manipulated for personal and financial gain. Quoting his late grandfather, Alex says, “The only real truth in this world is what you can get others to believe,” and notes that this philosophy has served him well over the years.
Until it doesn’t.
With jump cuts and music stings hammering home key plot points, the family bogs itself down in multiple scandals and tragedies, all of their own making. Alex gobbles down opioid painkillers like so many Tic Tacs while ripping off insurance settlements from clients, cheating on Maggie, and working his connections to muck up the investigation of a boating accident in which an inebriated Paul was at the wheel and a young woman was killed. “Everything is going to be OK…I’m getting it under control” is Alex’s mantra, even as it’s clear the casually corrupt Murdaugh family is fraying at every turn. Brittany Snow (continuing a run of terrific work that includes the feature film “X” and the Netflix series “The Hunting Wives”) delivers grounded and empathetic work as Mandy Matney, the real-life print reporter turned podcaster who investigates the Murdaughs’ connection to not only the boating accident, but possibly a cold case death of a young man years earlier.
Clarke oozes malevolence as the boisterous, temperamental, and often inebriated Alex, who is the chief villain—but Arquette subtly conveys Maggie’s compliance in certain instances, especially in her treatment of those she considers her inferiors, including the long-suffering but fiercely loyal housemaid Gloria (Kathleen Wilhoite). When Alex and Maggie go on an extravagant tropical vacation with sons Paul and Buster (Will Harrison), along with Buster’s girlfriend Brooklynn (Mina Sundwall), their behavior is so outsized and toxic, it’s as if they’re in a cheap road show version of “The White Lotus.”
Other than poor Brooklynn, whose loyalty to Buster and belief in him is admirable, these are terrible, weak people, unburdened by anything approaching a conscience. They’re also boorish and tedious as characters, as the writing keeps reminding us how the Murdaughs’ grip on public prosecutions as well as civil litigation gave them far too much power and privilege, which they exploited time and again until it all caught up with them. Even with two murders, two fatal accidents, and a suspicious death, “Death in the Family” often feels static and stalls under the weight of too much exposition and a surplus of minor characters who contribute little to the narrative.
Clarke and Arquette make for a formidable duo, playing a Southern power couple with an outwardly loving and lasting marriage that is, in truth, rotten to the core. Johnny Berchtold gives a live-wire performance as the troubled and arrogant Paul. The acting often outshines the merely competent direction, editing, and melodramatic writing. By the time we get to Alex’s murder trial, we’ve grown tired of the whole rancid Murdaugh bunch.
Premieres Oct. 15 with the first three episodes, with new episodes rolling out weekly until the finale debuts Nov. 19, on Hulu and Disney+. All eight episodes were screened for review.
