We’re all living in Murdaugh Country now

Shortly after “Murdaugh: Death in the Family” hints at the crimes that landed Alex Murdaugh in prison for life, it makes a time jump back to one of their supposedly better days when his family was still on top of the world.

It is Feb. 22, 2019, and Alex (played by Jason Clarke) struts around the family home while his wife Maggie (Patricia Arquette) and their housekeeper Gloria (Kathleen Wilhoite) prepare for a celebration honoring family patriarch Randolph Murdaugh (Gerald McRaney). When Gloria — or Go-Go, as they affectionately call her –– remarks that the truck belonging to her employers’ younger son, Paul (Johnny Berchtold), wasn’t in the driveway, the 19-year-old pulls up on cue, sporting evidence of having lost a battle with a tree.

Before he can yank the branch from his truck’s wheel well, the adults are on top of him. Alex spouts angry curses as Maggie laments that Paul has gone through more vehicles at the age of 19 than she has in her entire life.

“You keep messing around like that, you’re gonna win yourself another drinking ticket,” Maggie says, adding in a stern voice, “Hey. Hey. Hey! You!” Coming from another breed of mom, this would be a prelude to prescriptive punishment. Instead, Maggie simply says, “I’m glad you’re OK.”

So much for facing consequences for dangerous decisions.

Two days later, Paul drunkenly steers his family’s boat into a local bridge. But this time, Mallory Beach and other friends are with him. The crash injures everyone, but Mallory is ejected from the boat. Several days pass before the police recover her body.

While that was happening, according to the series dramatized version of events, Maggie finds out that Alex has been lying to her about his ongoing prescription drug habit. She’s also wearing an expensive tennis bracelet he’s gifted her, supposedly for no reason at all.

What does she do with this information after Paul plunges the family into another scandal? Very little. While Alex busily pressures the witnesses to refrain from telling the cops the truth, Mother helps her drunken boy into bed and promises to buy him a phone to replace the one lost in the accident.

Restitution for taking a human life tends to be much costlier, but Maggie knows her pill-addicted, philandering husband will negotiate a way out of paying. No price is too high to keep her sons out of trouble and the Murdaugh family’s reputation sterling in their tight South Carolina community. The bracelet remains on Maggie’s wrist.

Three generations of Murdaugh men constructed a fortress of political influence as state circuit solicitors, granting them a level of power that allowed them to evade numerous criminal allegations. Randolph brags about this in an upcoming episode when he tells his other failing grandson, Buster (Will Harrison), “The truth is irrelevant. You’re a Murdaugh.”

True crime thrives on audacity. Its offenders and unprosecuted scoundrels are extreme versions of the worst people, tapping the audience’s bottomless disbelief at human horrendousness. Villainy manifests in enough guises across the genre to make one feel lucky to have avoided some criminal’s trap.

That may be why “Murdaugh: Death in the Family” is infuriating as opposed to entertaining, because it confirms that we haven’t escaped any of that after all. This epiphany isn’t courtesy of any previously unrevealed information. Co-creators Michael D. Fuller and Erin Lee Carr based this eight-episode account on journalist Mandy Matney’s expansive “Murdaugh Murders Podcast,” but a Netflix documentary series and a Lifetime movie starring Bill Pullman covered most of the sordid details.

The Hulu series comes before us as history is actively misshaped by men like Alex Murdaugh, which makes it a distinctly masochistic viewing experience. Clarke’s depiction of Alex Murdaugh’s breezy lies, financial fraud and explosive anger mirrors the behavior of any number of crooked Trump administration cronies littering the 24-hour news cycle. That aspect is unremarkable.

Maggie’s Faustian trade of other people’s pain for her stature and comfort, however, has enough familiarity to make some of us stuff down a frustrated scream. Maggie is a Dress Barn version of Melania Trump, the type of wife people want to believe, for a while, anyway, is a hostage in her marriage instead of a willing prop for a terrible mate.

Or maybe she has more in common with Usha Vance, who mercenarily shelved her ambitions and her dignity to back her husband. In exchange, she attained high social status and journalistic attention, mainly to make sense of why this child of immigrants would stand by as her spouse demonizes immigration.

Maggie Murdaugh, as seen on TV, is the opposite of an enigma. She’s every woman who voted against the interests of other women – some 45% of them in the 2024 election, and mostly white, according to a Rutgers University study – while smiling in the faces of those harmed most by a decision they’ll claim was about grocery prices and protecting their retirement accounts. She is probably your neighbor. She might be your aunt or an in-law. She may be your mother.

And if you find that connection a bit dubious, witness this series’ depiction of Go-Go. After cleaning up Alex’s messes, digging his pill stash out of hiding, and assuring Paul of God’s forgiveness after he kills his friend, she prays for her employer’s brood to find much-needed rest on their vacation. The one Alex funds with insurance money he won for a disabled client.

Investing in the Murdaughs’ well-being and wealth will surely benefit their servant in the long run. Or maybe it’s simply the Christian thing to do.

For her loyalty, Go-Go is rewarded with a cheap souvenir from the family’s travels. Soon after that, she suffers a fall on the Murdaugh’s property that proves fatal. What happens next is public record, but since “Death in the Family” hasn’t gotten to that chapter, we’ll simply say Alex doesn’t care about honoring Gloria’s years of faithful service.

Given how her choices ultimately work out for Maggie, I realize this might be interpreted as speaking ill of the dead. On June 7, 2021, Alex called 911, claiming to have discovered Paul and Maggie’s bodies on the family’s hunting property. Both were shot multiple times. A subsequent investigation led to Alex’s conviction for their murders in 2023. He was also found guilty of multiple counts of fraud and money laundering, adding more than 60 years to his lifetime sentence for the killings, which he’s currently appealing.

Alex Murdaugh is a monster. Maggie and Paul did not deserve to die. There’s no disputing those facts. Neither is there harm in examining how such monsters’ sense of impunity is empowered. Viewed in that light, Arquette’s depiction is aggravatingly honest.

When Buster’s girlfriend asks whether she had any career ambitions, Maggie mentions briefly running a boutique but explains that it took too much time away from her boys. “You have to sacrifice a lot of things to make them the men that you know that they can be,” Maggie says. “But seeing them shine, everything that you gave up to get them there — it’s all worth it.”

Later in the same episode, she laments what could have been as she converses with a stranger she meets at a resort lounge. Her cocktail companion is a single mother and a physician who traveled the world with Doctors Without Borders. Gloria can’t bear to tell this beacon of independence the truth of who she is, so she makes up an ideal fantasy: She is single, never had children, runs a successful landscape architecture business, and would rather be at her beach house with her dog.

“Life is not perfect,” Maggie tells her vacation friend, “but it is good. And that makes me happy.”

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One almost feels sorry for Maggie until one takes stock of the ways society conditions us to excuse such women. Maggie is the best-case version of the submissive wife fantasy, a nice lady with a fancy house who wants to be thought well of and refers to her son’s victim as “that poor girl.” In the next breath, she urges her husband, a man who lures in his marks by quoting Bible verses, to make sure that the young woman’s family won’t get justice.

Soon Maggie is angrier at Alex for lying about his substance abuse than for having handed Paul the keys to their boat 48 hours after their son rolled up to their home, still drunk, and with a bough sticking out of his vehicle. A girl is dead, but Alex’s lie gets more of a rise out of his spurned wife.

Arquette has earned multiple award nominations over the years, and Globe and Emmy wins for previous portrayals of manipulative figures based on truly awful people at the center of other real crime cases. But Joyce “Tilly” Mitchell of “Escape at Dannemora” and the version of Dee Dee Blanchard that Arquette presents in “The Act” are obviously damaged and emotionally desperate.

Maggie, in contrast, is a woman who appears to view her underage son’s years of DUIs and car crashes as a phase, another way boys will be boys. We watch her mourn that poor Paul’s friends are ostracizing him after he killed one of them, only to cheer wildly after Alex hires a group of restaurant servers to force enough hard liquor down his kid’s throat to make him choke.

Turns like this make Arquette’s distillation of Maggie Murdaugh especially effective and conflicting. Surely there are mothers who reason they’d do anything to protect their children. Even so, one wonders how many parents would go as far as she does.

Many accounts of the Murdaugh family’s sordid history mention that the five-county South Carolina district doubling as their fiefdom was nicknamed Murdaugh Country. This level of multigenerational political and economic control seemed so wild in 2023 that we assured ourselves it was a singular regional nightmare. In 2025, it’s the national norm.

Thanks to folks like Maggie – and Gloria, if Wilhoite’s portrayal is accurate – we are all Murdaugh Country residents now. Toxic exceptionalism is making life worse for all of us, every day.

But if you’re still hurting for an answer to how we got here, Arquette offers an engrossing, maddening one in her portrait of Maggie Murdaugh, a woman who disregarded what her good life costs the people around her until the charlatan to whom she gave everything stole that from her, too.

Three episodes of “Murdaugh: Death in the Family” are streaming on Hulu. New episodes debut weekly on Wednesdays.