There was a time when the idea of turning the Murdaugh family saga into fiction would have seemed unthinkable — too grotesque, too recent, too exposed. The story had already been dissected through documentaries, podcasts, and relentless media coverage. But Murdaugh: Death in the Family, the Hulu drama starring Patricia Arquette and Jason Clarke, proves there was still something left to say — especially for those outside the United States.

Inside America, the Murdaugh name has long become shorthand for scandal and corrupted privilege. Outside it, however, the story remains almost unbelievable: a tale so drenched in power, impunity, and self-destruction it feels lifted from the pages of Nelson Rodrigues. That tragic, theatrical dimension — the sense of ordinary people unraveling behind a façade of respectability — is precisely what makes this dramatization unexpectedly compelling.

Like a true Rodrigues morality play, the Murdaughs’ opulence conceals a swamp of vices, omissions, and lies. What unfolds is less about crime and more about moral decay. Every dinner table, every silence, every exchange becomes a performance of rot. Patricia Arquette delivers the show’s aching heart — a woman trying to preserve her humanity in a world that treats vulnerability as weakness. Jason Clarke, in turn, embodies a patriarch who mistakes power for destiny.

By contrast, Hulu’s The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox revisited an older and definitively closed story. That show was about the media’s obsession with guilt; Death in the Family is about the impossibility of cleansing it. The Murdaugh case is not over — suspicions still linger around the deaths of young Stephen Smith and housekeeper Gloria Satterfield, whose ghosts haunt the family’s crumbling empire.

That’s why Death in the Family doesn’t feel exploitative — it feels interpretive. It dramatizes the corrosive psychology of power, how a dynasty built on deceit eventually collapses under its own weight. Even when the outcome is known, watching it feels like witnessing a car crash in slow motion — realizing that the true horror lies in how ordinary it all seems.

Some critics, like The Guardian’s Jack Seale, ask why anyone would want to sit through eight hours of moral filth. The answer may be hidden in that very discomfort: Murdaugh: Death in the Family forces America to confront what it fears most — that moral corruption can be hereditary.