‘Murdaugh: Death in the Family’ Isn’t About Alex Murdaugh — It’s About His Wife

If you’ve consumed enough content about disbarred, disgraced attorney and convicted murderer (among other crimes) Alex Murdaugh, we’ve got good news. Hulu’s Murdaugh: Death in the Family is quietly about Alex Murdaugh’s wife, Maggie Murdaugh, the limited series’ co-creators tell The Hollywood Reporter.

Fleshing out Maggie Murdaugh was a challenge. In each of the existing docuseries, most notably Netflix’s Murdaugh Murders: A Southern Scandal and HBO Max’s Low Country: The Murdaugh Dynasty (among others), Maggie Murdaugh is primarily a wife and secondarily a murder victim — or maybe it’s the other way around. While those facts about Maggie Murdaugh are both true, they’re also highly reductive.

Wikipedia doesn’t help much. Murdaugh: Death in the Family co-creator and director Erin Lee Carr (Britney vs Spears, The Ringleader: The Case of the Bling Ring) point our conversation to the Murdaugh family’s Wikipedia page, where Maggie Murdaugh has all of “one line.”

It’s this one right here: “Margaret ‘Maggie’ Kennedy Branstetter Murdaugh (Sept. 15, 1968 – June 7, 2021) was an American socialite fromSouth Carolina.”

Well, Margaret “Maggie” Kennedy Branstetter Murdaugh is about to posthumously get her flowers — yellow jessamine, the state flower of South Carolina, to be specific — Murdaugh: Death in the Family.

In their scripted limited series for Hulu, Carr and Michael D. Fuller (Locke & Key, The Mosquito Coast) wanted to see Maggie command her Lowcountry kitchen table, the duo tell THR.

“What was her life like? What was it like inside her bedroom?” Carr wonders. “We were so driven by wanting to understand her more as the matriarch of this family and what she wanted.”

Carr, a documentarian, knows that only a dramatized, written series could accomplish that. “What scripted television does,” she says, is it “adds new insight and really shows the spaces between people.”

Especially if you get Patricia Arquette (Severance, Boyhood) to portray one of those people. Arquette may not have known a whole lot about Maggie Murdaugh, but she knows the type.

“You marry, you’re married for life,” she tells THR. “You’re a Southern woman and sometimes you have hiccups in your marriage and you just push through, and you work it out and you raise your kids, and you build this bond together — and that is your success. And you’re happy being in the backseat and you’re happy letting him be the quarterback. You don’t want people singing ‘Happy Birthday’ in the restaurant to you, you’re the PTA mom that wants to drop off the food. You’re the one taking the pictures, you’re the one behind the scenes. Most American women who deal with domestic violence and are murdered, are murdered by their intimate partner. I wanted to honor her, I wanted to honor women who go through these mechanisms in dysfunctional marriages.”

Hulu will premiere the first three episodes of Murdaugh: Death in the Family on Wednesday. By that third one, Fuller says, Maggie Murdaugh is not just standing by her man.

“Our Maggie, and how Patricia so wonderfully realizes her is — this light bulb that’s been inside of her starts to flicker on that she didn’t know was even there,” Fuller says. “And I think it’s like that burgeoning awareness of ‘What has my life been?’ and really starting to examine those things in a way that she hasn’t before.”

“Obviously we’re inspired by these real events, and we can only infer what we can infer, but hopefully wanting to do so respectfully and also try to capture something about this woman in this story that hasn’t — to this point — been captured,” he says.