Murdaugh: Death in the Family review – Patricia Arquette is great in this outrageous true crime drama | television

HHow amazingly terrible were the Murdochs? Very much, depending on how much true crime content they create. There has already been a successful podcast about them, untangling a narrative that began with enviable luxury and ended in a sordid double murder. There has already been a TV documentary. Now the Murdoughs complete the collection with Murdough: Death in the Family, a lavish fantasy drama that tells the same terrible story.

At its heart is a trio of strong performances, primed for awards season. Jason Clarke — also currently excellent as a variation of the alpha male in The Last Frontier on Apple TV+ — is Richard Alexander “Alex” Murdaugh, a powerful personal injury attorney and member of a South Carolina dynasty whose men have been the biggest monsters in the courtroom for generations. Over the years, the Murdochs — their name sounds like “Murder” but is pronounced “murdoch” — have built a network of assistants to whom they owe a living or a favor. Their legal acumen and wealth, combined with the gangs’ penchant for exploitation and bullying, give them a level of impunity that Alex gladly pushes to the extreme. Patricia Arquette is Maggie, Alex’s wife, who worries about his resurgent flirtation and opioid addiction — and on the second point at least, she’s right.

Johnny Berchtold outshines his more established co-stars in giving the best characterization ever as Paul, Alex and Maggie’s son, who has just reached the end of his teens but already seems irredeemable. An alcoholic with a desperate obsession over drinking beer, Paul is angered by his father’s labeling of him as a failure in the family, an insult he usually reacts to by proving Pops right.

Almost catatonic with drunken self-loathing, Paul takes some friends out on a speedboat at night, ignoring their terrifying screams as the vehicle speeds along. It crashed into a bridge, killing one of the group. As Alex tries to make sure Paul gets away with it, Maggie watches her son’s guilt slowly turn into psychosis, local news reporter Mandy Matney (Brittany Snow, playing the real-life journalist whose podcast inspired this drama) attacks the media’s unwillingness to confront the Murdoughs, and the clan’s fragile armor begins to crack.

As a psychoanalysis of a family in which every relationship has been poisoned by the father’s cruelty and further corroded by power and money, Death in the Family is comprehensive. Whether it’s an encounter with a poor immigrant family hoping for life-changing reparations, a family dinner on vacation in the Bahamas, or a staring match in the bathroom mirror, any interaction involving Murdoch is a lie, a blackmail, or a show of dominance. The image of a certain segment of white Southern capitalists, whose straight talk barely conceals that every battle they have ever won has been rigged, is a harsh one. As with the portrayal of the American civil law system as a game where aggressive negotiations and dodgy insurance claims turn life, loss and happiness into commodities – all anyone cares about is the size of the settlement number. It’s outrageous, even before Alex starts scamming his clients out of their money.

The issue of death in the family as a drama is why viewers want to expose themselves to it. Eight long episodes loom, promising a more comprehensive examination or speculation about every aspect of the life of the cursed Murdo family than the documentary offers. Alex and Maggie’s marriage is corrupt, their upbringing is corrupt, and their son’s soul is corrupt. Their business empire is a corrupt edifice of bribery and shady accounting. By the time the series starts hinting at a bad outcome for the devout housekeeper Gloria (Kathleen Wilhoite), whose status as the beloved unofficial member of the family doesn’t mean the Murdochs would do anything to lift them out of abject poverty, you might want to stick with them any further: the mixture of disgust, schadenfreude, and sadness grows bitter.

Arquette is the heart of the show, as much as it has heart, as the woman who’s married into it all and who can’t be the loving wife and fierce mother she wants to be because Murdaugh’s men can’t stomach it. But it’s hard to put her in her place: she’s too aware of her situation to be a tragically deluded victim, too incapable of qualifying as a conspirator we can despise. The Murdoughs are terrible in so many different ways, it’s difficult to maintain a meaningful understanding of them all at once. No matter how well “Death in the Family” does, it begs the same question as many other true crime shows: Why should I force myself to watch?