‘Murdaugh: Death in the Family’ Blows Up the Myth of the Southern Gentleman

The story of the scandalous Murdaugh family has been told many times since it reached its climax in 2021. The Murdaugh Murders Podcast was followed by documentaries from HBO, Investigation Discovery, and Netflix. Still, documentarian Erin Lee Carr saw an opportunity to detail the allegations against members of the influential South Carolina clan in a different way. “What I really wanted to focus on was kind of the thing that the documentaries couldn’t see: What happened inside the house,” she says. The result of that interest, Hulu series Murdaugh: Death in the Family—premiering Wednesday—marks Carr’s scripted TV debut.

Carr used the skills she honed on the Gypsy-Rose Blanchard doc Mommy Dead and Dearest and Bling Ring reconsideration The Ringleader when she cocreated the series with scripted TV vet Michael D. Fuller. “I had this 400-plus page research binder that had all the police reports, the interviews, the archive, everything,” she says. “I feel extremely proud of the accuracy and the attention to detail that we have been able to put inside the show.”

The sheer size of that binder exemplifies the challenge of recapping the Murdaugh saga. Members of this august clan have been players in the local political and legal scene of South Carolina’s Lowcountry region since the 1920s, amassing a fortune as successive generations occupied elected positions and built a private legal practice.

But the family’s perfect facade began to crack in 2019, when 19-year-old Paul Murdaugh was involved in a boat crash during which 19-year-old Mallory Beach was killed. Afterward, Beach’s family filed a $10 million lawsuit against Paul’s father, attorney Alex Murdaugh, as well as his mother, Maggie Murdaugh, and brother, Buster Murdaugh. Alex Murdaugh claimed he lacked the funds to settle the suit, prompting an attorney for the Beach family to file a motion asking the court to compel Alex to completely disclose his finances. (In 2023, the Beach family reached a settlement with Maggie’s estate and Buster; in 2024, they reached a settlement with Alex.) Three days before a hearing on that motion, Paul and Maggie were fatally shot on their family property. In 2023, Alex was convicted of their murders and received consecutive life sentences. He has continued to maintain his innocence, and his conviction is under appeal.

That’s just an overview of an incredibly twisty case, one that encompasses gross financial malfeasance, fraud against Murdaugh-represented plaintiffs in personal injury cases, allegations against Buster Murdaugh, which he denied, related to a 2015 homicide, oxycodone addiction, a domestic worker who suffered an ultimately fatal fall on the property (Alex invented a story that his dogs had tripped her, for which he pocketed an insurance payout he was later ordered to pay back to her family), and Alex’s attempt to arrange his own death. “There’s almost so much story, we had trouble picking what was going to be in,” Carr says. But in that recap alone, you can see why the saga has appealed to so many filmmakers and actors—including Bill Pullman, who played Alex Murdaugh in a two-part Lifetime drama in 2023.

The eight-episode Hulu series, which will release episodes weekly, features Australian actor Jason Clarke in the Alex Murdaugh role—shambling around the family mansion like Frankenstein’s monster with a Foghorn Leghorn accent, waving around guns, popping pills, guzzling booze, and throwing around cash like it’s going out of style.

His Alex is a coarse rebuttal to the myth of Southern gentility, with the dining habits of Dennis Quaid’s character in The Substance and dull, dead eyes, even as he takes his family on a five-figure resort vacation paid with money stolen from one of his firm’s clients. That’s intentional, says Carr. “There was something very three-years-old about Alex Murdaugh and his wants, his needs, having to happen right now.” And as generations of parents can attest, nobody’s more evil than a three-year-old.

While Alex is the show’s twisted, rotten center, Maggie Murdaugh provides much of its heart. Carr has long been frustrated by how little we know about the Murdaugh matriarch, who faced criticism for her parenting following the 2019 fatal boat crash. “We made this show to give Maggie more of a voice, to understand what happens when you are in a marriage that you can’t leave,” Carr says. So when Patricia Arquette agreed to play Maggie, “everyone breathed the biggest sigh of relief, because she’s such a star and shows so much humanity. So we knew we could do something so different with this show.”

The series is very kind to Maggie, her slain son Paul (Johnny Berchtold), and to Paul’s brother, Buster (Will Harrison). “I feel a ton of compassion and empathy for Buster Murdaugh, and I think that what he has gone through is the stuff of the truest nightmares one could ever,” Carr says. “He was set up to have a normal life, and then somehow he found himself at his dad’s murder trial, having to testify. What side do you sit on? There is the victim side, which is Maggie and Paul, and then there’s the defendant side, which is Alex. Who do you love?”

In the series, Buster appears to eventually agree that his father is guilty. In reality, that’s less clear; speaking with Fox Nation in 2023, Buster maintained that his mother and brother’s killer remains at large. Like the show’s creative team, Vanity Fair attempted to reach Buster Murdaugh for comment, but did not receive a response.

If there’s any backlash to the series, it may come because the show demonstrates too much empathy for the non-Alex Murdaughs. People harmed by Alex’s financial crimes (to which he pleaded guilty and received an additional 40-year sentence) are seen only briefly, while Mallory Beach and her family get slightly more attention—but the show’s sympathy seems to lie with Alex’s immediate relatives. To many, the vile Ratliff family on the most recent season of The White Lotus might be a more accurate portrait of the Murdaughs’ general vibe.

One thing the Ratliffs and fictional Murdaughs share is an obsession with money—and the crippling fear of losing it all. “I try to study what money does to ego and what it does to entitlement,” Carr says. “I think that in the Murdaugh story. It was the American dream for them to come into the money that they did. But, you know, money changes people. You have to respect money and understand that it can come in—but it can just as quickly leave.”