Murdaugh: Death in the Family review – A totally unnecessary rehashing of a nasty case

It’s a well-trodden path by now. An outlandish crime story hits the local news, then gets picked up by an intrepid podcaster who’s willing and able to do some serious digging. It’s a big enough hit that the streamers decide to get in on the action, rolling out a documentary with as many talking heads, and as much grainy home video footage, as they can muster. Then, just as the story is about to reach saturation point, a ponderous drama gets announced.

That’s almost the precise life cycle of the circus of infamy surrounding South Carolina’s Murdaugh dynasty. The family (whose name is pronounced “Murdoch”) were a wealthy, powerful clan of lawyers whose legal prestige went back about a century. Their dramatic fall from grace, taking place over the course of half a decade or so, feels like a Southern Gothic tale come to life, with shades of William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams and Truman Capote.

It’s no wonder, then, that the story, which only really concluded last year, has already been chronicled extensively. Disney+ drama Murdaugh: Death in the Family is the first TV dramatisation of this strange, bleak saga, based on a previous podcast (whose host, the journalist Mandy Matney, is played here by Brittany Snow), but there have already been a couple of documentaries (on Netflix and on HBO), a weighty bestseller charting the case (The Devil at His Elbow by Valerie Bauerlein), and even a Lifetime movie. Perhaps that’s why, despite the strong cast and the undeniably punchy source material, this eight-parter seems to suffer from a case of diminishing returns.

Death in the Family is solidly but uninspiringly made, staying true to the hallmarks of prestige true crime. It begins in the thick of tragedy, as Alex Murdaugh (Jason Clarke) makes a panicked call to the emergency services: his wife Maggie (Patricia Arquette) and younger son Paul (Johnny Berchtold) have been fatally shot outside the dog kennels at Moselle, the family’s hunting estate.

Then, we rewind back two years, from 2021 to 2019, to trace the events that brought the Murdaughs to this horrifying breaking point. After a drunken night out with his friends, Paul gets behind the wheel of his family’s boat; when the inebriated teenager crashes it into a bridge, three of his passengers fall into the water. Two survive, but the body of 19-year-old Mallory Beach is found in the water a week later.

Death in the Family goes some way to probing how the family use their power, influence and money to try to make this inconvenient problem go away; God forbid a young woman’s death put a dampener on their tearaway son’s bright future. But it also feels weighed down by exposition, and by a sprawling cast of characters that seem to pop up and then disappear; frankly, it’s near-impossible to keep track of which Murdaugh is which after a while.

Arquette and Clarke – who is acting from beneath layers of prosthetics, and a yellow-blonde dye job that had me itching to recommend purple toning shampoo – make a commanding, compelling duo as the couple whose marriage isn’t quite as sturdy as it appears to outsiders. Alex may be a respected lawyer, but he relies on knocking back heavy-duty pain meds and booze to get himself through the long days; this habit has also left his finances in disarray.

As Alex falls apart, Clarke gets to do flashier work – but Arquette makes Maggie’s quieter unravelling just as interesting, if not more so. Even before their family life has truly gone off the rails, you can see her silent, seething frustration as Alex bullies her under the guise of banter, chucking jellyfish into her bath as she closes her eyes for a brief moment of relaxation. Her scenes with Succession’s J Smith-Cameron, who plays Maggie’s older sister Marian, are masterclasses in understatement, a good counterpoint to some of the series’ more melodramatic tendencies.

But even these winning performances can’t distract from the overwhelming sense that the series itself feels unnecessary. It’s unclear precisely what further light a drama like this can shed on this nasty case, and at eight episodes long, the story feels dragged out, weighed down by subplots that never quite seem to go anywhere. It’s hard to shake the feeling that this is the TV equivalent of a meeting that could have been an email.