“It’s only cheating if you get caught,” says Alex Murdaugh (Jason Clarke) at the start of Murdaugh: Death in the Family.
It was the prospect of being busted for his deceptions—as well as a confluence of pressures, resentments, anger, grief, and drugs—that drove the South Carolina scion to murder his wife Maggie (Patricia Arquette) and younger son Paul (Johnny Berchtold) on June 7, 2021.
Alex’s terrible fall from grace has been the subject of countless news stories and docuseries (including Netflix’s comprehensive Murdaugh Murders: A Southern Scandal), and Michael D. Fuller and Erin Lee Carr’s eight-part Hulu miniseries, premiering Oct. 15, doesn’t provide damning new revelations.
What it does afford, however, is a thorough and multifaceted portrait of the factors that made Alex commit his heinous deed, and a convincing and riveting performance from Jason Clarke that brings this tragedy, and the despicable man who caused it, to full-bodied life.
Murdaugh: Death in the Family is inspired by Murdaugh Murders Podcast by Mandy Matney, and features Brittany Snow as the crusading podcaster, yet she’s a relative addendum to a show whose main focus is Alex and his relationship with his family, who for three generations served as circuit solicitors for South Carolina’s 14th judicial district—positions that allowed them to amass tremendous wealth, power, and standing in their home state.
Its tale culminates in 2021 but begins in 2019, with Alex thriving as a lawyer for Peters, Murdaugh, Parker, Eltzroth & Detrick (PMPED) alongside his daunting father Randolph III (Gerald McRaney), who’s disappointed that Alex didn’t follow in his solicitor footsteps and seems more trusting of his elder son Randy (Noah Emmerich). To cope, Alex pops pain pills on the regular, hiding his habit from his wife Maggie, a homemaker whose loyalty to her clan is being put to the test by her domineering husband, who has a tendency to misbehave in various ugly ways (including cheating) and then make it up to her with gifts and protestations of love.
Of more pressing concern for Alex and Maggie is Paul, a ne’er-do-well whose drunken out-of-control behavior peaks with a Feb. 24, 2019, boat crash that kills his buddy’s girlfriend Mallory Beach (Madeline Popovich). At the hospital, Alex and Randolph try to perform damage control, manipulating and intimidating both authorities and survivors to manufacture a story that clears Paul of wrongdoing, and their conduct—using money and influence to do what they please and to suffer no consequences for their actions—is par for the course for Alex in Murdaugh: Death in the Family.
Later, amidst numerous crises, Randolph cries out, “What has become of this family?”, and the answer is obvious: after getting away with (figurative) murder for the better part of a century, they’re finally reaping what they’ve sown.
Cannily dramatized by Fuller and Carr, Murdaugh: Death in the Family lays out the family’s myriad mounting troubles, with subtle early hints paying dividends down the road. As Alex strives to keep Paul out of jail, he continues a long-standing practice of lining his pockets with company funds and client settlement checks in order to fund his lavish lifestyle.
On a beach-resort vacation intended to give them a respite from Paul’s scandal (and the rumor-mill whispering that now accompanies them everywhere they go), Maggie grapples with her unhappiness. Meanwhile, two separate conversations with older son Buster (Will Harrison) about his relationship with girlfriend Brooklyn (Mina Sundwall) plant seeds of doubt about his sexuality that foreshadow the reopening of the case of Stephen Smith, a local gay teen whom Buster is suspected of having killed.
Even though Mandy eventually discovers that, contrary to gossip, Buster was not Stephen’s secret boyfriend, he’s tainted by suspicion, further darkening the cloud hovering over the Murdaughs.
The walls are soon closing in on Alex, as the lawsuit against Paul involves inquiries into his finances—a seemingly catastrophic turn of events given that he’s knee-deep in fraud and embezzlement. Murdaugh: Death in the Family is a slow-motion portrait of a family collapsing on all sides, and it captures how Alex’s personal issues—his bitterness at Paul for the boat crash; his fury and despair over Maggie’s desire for a divorce; his heartache about his father’s failing health; and even his tensions with Randy—helped push him toward his homicidal crimes.
In this climate, the unexpected fate of housekeeper Gloria (Kathleen Wilhoite) seems mighty dubious, as does just about everything out of the mouth of Alex, who eventually ropes his cousin Eddie (Mark Pellegrino) into a scheme that Fuller and Carr imply was designed to bolster his claims that Paul and Maggie were targeted because someone had it out for the family (possibly over Mallory’s death).
Murdaugh: Death in the Family is an exhaustive and complex accounting of this ignominious saga, and at its center is Clarke as Alex, a squinting, heavyset blonde cock-of-the-walk whose imperiousness knows no bounds, and whose every word—even when kind and supportive—sounds self-serving. Carrying himself as an arrogant prince who’s constantly feeding his insatiable appetites, Clarke disappears into his revolting role, calling everyone “bo” (a catch-all term akin to “bro”) and grinning and leering like the most off-putting nepo baby in history.
Everyone else in Fuller and Carr’s series is compelling—including Arquette, who gets at Maggie’s devotion, anguish, and passive and active culpability in enabling her husband and sons’ wrongdoing—but it’s the actor’s lead turn that truly energizes this familiar material.
Randall’s fondness for Dale Wimbrow’s poem “The Man in the Glass,” which he gifted to everyone and which hung, framed, in Alex’s home—and which is about personal integrity—proves an ironic counterpoint to the treachery depicted in Murdaugh: Death in the Family, which concludes with the arrest, trial, and conviction of Alex for his wife and son’s slaying.
Though Fuller and Carr don’t deliver any eye-opening bombshells, their series is an accomplished bit of true-crime storytelling, digging deeply into the Murdaughs’ complicated past and present to unearth the tangled forces that led to unthinkable murder. And in Clarke, it crafts a memorable vision of a man who, through a mixture of entitlement, selfishness, desperation, and sociopathic callousness, revealed himself to be a monster.
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