Megan McLachlan talks to Murdaugh: Death in the Family showrunner Michael D. Fuller about this “run-on sentence” of a true story and including the Stephen Smith Murdaugh connection in the Hulu limited series. *Spoilers ahead*
When you think about it, Alex Murdaugh’s story is too incredible to believe.
A fatal boating accident, a deadly fall from the cleaning lady, a drug addiction. And that’s just in the first few episodes of Hulu’s limited series Murdaugh: Death in the Family. Showrunner Michael D. Fuller says he quickly realized he was cramming a lot of story into eight episodes.
“There’s a world where a show that’s adapting this story goes on for four seasons,” says Fuller, “and even then, you still may not encapsulate everything. But, you know, I think what was really the challenge — and I mean that in a good way — was like, okay, how can we streamline these things? How can we maintain the truth of things and the emotional truth of things? And then adapt those accordingly so that we’re telling a cohesive, accessible story for the audience.”
Fuller and co-showrunner Erin Lee Carr made the creative decision not to show Alex behind the gun in Episode 6’s “June 7th,” which depicts the night of the murders. However, in the finale, we finally see how his actions unfolded on that fateful night — and it lays it all out pretty clearly. If you were on the jury and saw this episode, it would be pretty damning evidence.
“We got the entire court transcripts, so we were able to go through that,” he continues. “And that’s invaluable when we’re dramatizing the courtroom footage, and we’re having to really condense and streamline things. But it also lays out everything you could ever want to know. And when it gets into the weeds of details about parked cars […], it gives you the breadth and depth of what their lives looked like in so many ways. And then that allows us to do our interpretation and our version of it.”
I had a great conversation with Fuller about his South Carolina background, filling in the gaps of the story, and what it was like to lose Patricia Arquette and Johnny Berchtold in the final two episodes. Watch or listen to the conversation below!
