If youve consumed enough content about disbarred, disgraced attorney and convicted murderer (among other crimes) Alex Murdaugh, weve got good news. Hulus Murdaugh: Death in the Family is quietly about Alex Murdaughs wife, Maggie Murdaugh, the limited series co-creators tell The Hollywood Reporter.

Fleshing out Maggie Murdaugh was a challenge. In each of the existing docuseries, most notably Netflixs Murdaugh Murders: A Southern Scandal and HBO Maxs Low Country: The Murdaugh Dynasty (among others), Maggie Murdaugh is primarily a wife and secondarily a murder victim or maybe its the other way around. While those facts about Maggie Murdaugh are both true, theyre also highly reductive. Wikipedia doesnt help much. Murdaugh: Death in the Family co-creator and director Erin Lee Carr (Britney vs Spears, The Ringleader: The Case of the Bling Ring) point our conversation to the Murdaugh familys Wikipedia page, where Maggie Murdaugh has all of one line.

Its this one right here: Margaret Maggie Kennedy Branstetter Murdaugh (Sept. 15, 1968 June 7, 2021) was an American socialite fromSouth Carolina.

Well, Margaret Maggie Kennedy Branstetter Murdaugh is about to posthumously get her flowers yellow jessamine, the state flower of South Carolina, to be specific Murdaugh: Death in the Family.

In their scripted limited series for Hulu, Carr and Michael D. Fuller (Locke Key, The Mosquito Coast) wanted to see Maggie command her Lowcountry kitchen table, the duo tell THR.

What was her life like? What was it like inside her bedroom? Carr wonders. We were so driven by wanting to understand her more as the matriarch of this family and what she wanted.

Carr, a documentarian, knows that only a dramatized, written series could accomplish that. What scripted television does, she says, is it adds new insight and really shows the spaces between people.

Especially if you get Patricia Arquette (Severance, Boyhood) to portray one of those people. Arquette may not have known a whole lot about Maggie Murdaugh, but she knows the type.

You marry, youre married for life, she tells THR. Youre a Southern woman and sometimes you have hiccups in your marriage and you just push through, and you work it out and you raise your kids, and you build this bond together and that is your success. And youre happy being in the backseat and youre happy letting him be the quarterback. You dont want people singing Happy Birthday in the restaurant to you, youre the PTA mom that wants to drop off the food. Youre the one taking the pictures, youre the one behind the scenes. Most American women who deal with domestic violence and are murdered, are murdered by their intimate partner. I wanted to honor her, I wanted to honor women who go through these mechanisms in dysfunctional marriages.

Hulu will premiere the first three episodes of Murdaugh: Death in the Family on Wednesday. By that third one, Fuller says, Maggie Murdaugh is not just standing by her man.

Our Maggie, and how Patricia so wonderfully realizes her is this light bulb thats been inside of her starts to flicker on that she didnt know was even there, Fuller says. And I think its like that burgeoning awareness of What has my life been? and really starting to examine those things in a way that she hasnt before.

Obviously were inspired by these real events, and we can only infer what we can infer, but hopefully wanting to do so respectfully and also try to capture something about this woman in this story that hasnt to this point been captured, he says.