In case you’re consumed enough content about disbarred, disgraced attorney and convicted murderer (amongst other crimes) Alex Murdaugh, we’ve got excellent news. Hulu’s Murdaugh: Death within the Family is quietly about Alex Murdaugh’s wife, Maggie Murdaugh, the limited series’ co-creators told The Hollywood Reporter.
Fleshing out Maggie Murdaugh was a challenge. In each of those docuseries, most notably Netflix’s Murdaugh Murders: A Southern Scandal and HBO Max’s Low Country: The Murdaugh Dynasty (amongst others), Maggie Murdaugh is primarily a wife and secondarily a murder victim — or perhaps it’s the opposite way around. While those facts about Maggie Murdaugh are each true, they’re also highly reductive.
Wikipedia doesn’t help much. Murdaugh: Death within the Family co-creator and director Erin Lee Carr (Britney vs Spears, The Ringleader: The Case of the Bling Ring) pointed 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 from South 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 within the Family.
Of their scripted limited series for Hulu, Carr and Michael D. Fuller (Locke & Key, The Mosquito Coast) desired to see Maggie command her Lowcountry kitchen table, the duo told THR.
“What was her life like? What was it like inside her bedroom?” Carr wondered. “We were so driven by wanting to grasp her more because 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 said, it “adds latest insight and really shows the spaces between people.”
Especially should you get Patricia Arquette (Severance, Boyhood) to portray one in all those people. Arquette may not have known a complete lot about Maggie Murdaugh, but she knows the kind.
“You marry, you’re married for all times,” she told THR. “You’re a southern woman and sometimes you might have hiccups in your marriage and you only push through, and you’re employed it out and also you raise your kids, and also you construct this bond together — and that’s your success. And also you’re completely satisfied being within the backseat and also you’re completely satisfied letting him be the quarterback. You don’t want people singing ‘Blissful Birthday’ within the restaurant to you, you’re the PTA mom that desires to drop off the food. You’re the one taking the photographs, you’re the one behind the scenes. Most American women who cope with domestic violence and are murdered, are murdered by their intimate partner. I desired to honor her, I desired to honor women who undergo these mechanisms in dysfunctional marriages.”
Hulu will premiere the primary three episodes of Murdaugh: Death within the Family on Wednesday. By that third one, Fuller said, Maggie Murdaugh just isn’t just standing by her man.
“Our Maggie, and the way Patricia so splendidly realizes her is — this lightbulb that’s been within her starts to flicker on that she didn’t know was even there,” Fuller said. “And I believe it’s like that burgeoning awareness of ‘What has my life been?’ and really beginning to examine those things in a way that she hasn’t before.”
“Obviously we’re inspired by these real events, and we will only infer what we will infer, but hopefully wanting to accomplish that respectfully and likewise attempt to capture something about this woman on this story that hasn’t — thus far — been captured,” he said.