Hulu tackles Murdaugh murders with big-budget series shot in Atlanta
The Murdaugh family murders were tailor-made to be recounted in multiple formats. So far, the details have been replayed in a true crime podcast, a documentary, a Lifetime movie — and now a scripted miniseries.
Hulu commissioned the eight-episode limited series “Murdaugh: Death in the Family” and shot it largely in metro Atlanta earlier this year. The first three episodes debuted last week, chronicling the downfall of a wealthy, well-connected South Carolina family with well-regarded actor Jason Clarke as the charmingly manipulative Alex Murdaugh and Patricia Arquette as his kind, supportive wife Maggie.
The 2021 murder of Maggie Murdaugh and the couple’s younger son Paul made national headlines, and investigators eventually pegged Alex Murdaugh as the culprit. A judge sentenced Murdaugh to two life sentences for the murders in 2023. He also was sentenced to 40 years in prison for federal financial crimes last year.
Clarke does his best to inject humanity into Alex Murdaugh, an attorney whose privileges have shielded him from consequences his entire life. But Murdaugh’s connections and charisma can take him only so far as he desperately tries to keep his marriage together while hiding financial malfeasance, nursing an opiate addiction and keeping his son out of prison for boating under the influence in a 2019 accident that led to the death of teenager Mallory Beach.
“You start to realize what’s going on underneath this man is a mountain of lies that changes what he finds important,” said Clarke, a veteran Australian actor who gained considerable weight and learned a convincing South Carolinian drawl for the part.
As Murdaugh staved off impending doom, Clarke noted, “like a lot of men in his situation, he didn’t take responsibility for what he did. He decided to take the ship down with him.”
While there was no shortage of footage and coverage of Alex Murdaugh, Arquette had a more challenging role filling in the blanks about Maggie Murdaugh, who comes across as both sweet and susceptible to being gaslit by her husband’s frequent whining about victimhood.
Arquette, who won an Oscar in 2015 for her role in “Boyhood,” said she “wanted to honor the person who is the support system. She is the codependent who is silently resentful. Sadly, the majority of women who are murdered are murdered by their intimate partners (or other family members). You don’t see it coming or you would have left.”
Johnny Berchtold plays the couple’s son as a spoiled teen with no direction in life. The guilt over Beach’s death weighs on him even as his father keeps telling him to move on.
“Paul’s coping mechanisms were really intense,” Berchtold said. One scene in the show, which may or may not be true, has Paul goad a stranger to hit him because he felt like he deserved it.
Before his father murdered him, Paul Murdaugh in the series appeared to be moving in a positive direction, making his death even more tragic. “We aren’t trying to excuse what he did but to understand it,” Berchtold said. “That’s the vibe.”
“Murdaugh” also paints a tragic figure in older son Buster Murdaugh, who was dogged with unfounded rumors regarding another death and ended up with two dead family members and a disgraced father in prison.
Writer and producer Michael D. Fuller said compared with previous projects, “we have the benefit of the most hindsight of any exploration of this story. We had the most information to go on … If there is a real tragedy to the story, it’s Buster Murdaugh and we wanted to capture that element and dynamic.”
Will Harrison, the actor who played Buster Murdaugh, said he “for a long time carried the weight of the legacy of his family. Now he has to deal with the legacy devolving into what it is today.”
The story, which covers about seven hours of airtime, could have gone four seasons, Fuller said. “It’s so sprawling,” he said. “Every time you turned around, there was another captivating detail or person. We only had eight episodes so we had to make choices” that condensed the storyline.
For instance, the Hulu series moved the accidental death of the Murdaughs’ beloved housekeeper Gloria Satterfield so it happened after the boating incident instead of before. This way, viewers could get to know her better without shifting the time frame.
“We were inspired by what we learned about her in the research,” Fuller said. “We wanted to keep her alive in that respect so we’d feel the loss of her more emotionally compelling.”
The producers, who used Assembly Studios in Doraville as home base for many indoor scenes, had no problem finding exterior locations in metro Atlanta for most of what they needed for the series, which shot from March through June.
Chateau Elan Winery & Resort in Braselton masqueraded as a fancy resort in the Bahamas. Stone Mountain Park was the site where Alex Murdaugh’s father Randolph (Gerald McRaney) was feted. Lake Lanier was used for the boating accident.
“We got pretty much everything we needed within an hour’s drive of Atlanta save for Edisto Beach,” where the Murdaughs owned a beach house, said Fuller, who is from South Carolina. “We did go to South Carolina to film that. It helped to shoot the South as the South. And there was such a diverse and eclectic group of neighborhoods in Atlanta that stood in for different aspects of this story.”
The series is based on the “Murdaugh Murders Podcast” hosted by journalist Mandy Matney, who worked for The Island Packet when the boating accident happened and covered the case over multiple years. Played by Brittany Snow, fresh off her Netflix hit “The Hunting Wives,” Matney comes across as a dogged and caring reporter.
“Print journalism is a big part of it,” Matney said. “As someone who has loved newspapers all my life, it makes me warm and fuzzy. But I wanted to speak truth to power and a podcast was the answer to that. I appreciated how the series incorporated the journalism into the storyline.”
If you watch
“Murdaugh: Death in the Family,” available on Hulu
About the Author
Rodney Ho writes about entertainment for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution including TV, radio, film, comedy and all things in between. A native New Yorker, he has covered education at The Virginian-Pilot, small business for The Wall Street Journal and a host of beats at the AJC over 20-plus years. He loves tennis, pop culture & seeing live events.
