In this way, Murder on Middle Beach is a more satisfying alternative to The Undoing. Rather than seeking to find someone to blame for her death, Madison becomes more interested in exonerating family members who have clear alibis while clearing away the cobwebs left by generations of caginess. She was warm and charismatic, big-hearted and understanding-and naive, dishonest, and unscrupulous. Throughout the series, Madison learns the details of his mother’s journey from his aunts and family friends, and struggles to reconcile the contradictory elements of her personality. The way she went about this was seemingly well intentioned, yet economically shady in a manner that loosely mirrored the alleged misdeeds of her ex-husband. Recovery, for Barbara, meant not only an investment in A.A., but a plan for recouping her own earnings, as Jeffrey was not paying child support or alimony. Of course, addiction is an expensive illness-as is, typically, its treatment. Their extended family cannot do much for the two of them besides answering Madison’s questions-who was his mother, and who do they think may have killed her in such a violent, personal, yet remorseful manner? (Her body was left covered in her yard-a small act of kindness.)Īlcohol addiction runs in the Beach family, with three out of four daughters (including Barbara and Conway) suffering from the illness-their own father eventually parlayed his sobriety into a career as a public speaker. Dad, a disgraced businessman who conducted secretive international deals investigated by the FBI, was described as distant and defensive with a history of controlling behavior. Emerging into adulthood, both he and his sister were essentially orphaned. The whole thing is, to say the least, a devastating mess. Madison’s mom was killed when he was only 18, a teenager still dealing with addiction issues that plagued him throughout high school and in the wake of his parents’ ugly divorce. Throughout the series, Madison’s interviewees-from his uncle to his grandmother to his mother’s friends from A.A.-ask him, the investigator, if he’s okay.
#MURDER ON MIDDLE BEACH SERIES#
Rather than trying to push viewers to the brink with a series of cliff-hangers or gotchas, Madison and his producers are more interested in a thorny question: How well can we know even those closest to us? Yet Madison’s identity as the deceased’s son, as well as his amateurish though steady work trying to solve the crime, allows the narrative to reveal deeper and deeper layers as it goes along. Viewers will flock to both series for similar reasons-it’s fascinating to see how wealthy families fall apart, despite all their access and comforts. Murder on Middle Beach’s fictional mirror is The Undoing, HBO’s limited drama series about an extremely wealthy New York family rocked by the murder of a working-class mother whose son attends the same fancy private school as their son. In this series of wrenching conversations between Madison and his family, the procedural genre is laid vulnerably bare. He spent eight years speaking to various family members and unveiling long-held secrets for his documentary went to the police station with a concealed voice recorder in his pocket had to ask his own little sister, Ali, and aunt Conway-who together discovered his mother’s body-if they killed her and desperately tried to get answers from the number one police suspect, his father, Jeffrey Hamburg. (Another recent HBO series, I’ll Be Gone in the Dark, also approaches true crime through an intimate lens, though the link between the crimes and their investigator is not as direct.) Director Madison Hamburg is the son of Barbara “Barbie” Beach, who was violently murdered outside her home in 2010. In Murder on Middle Beach, a new limited docuseries on HBOMax about a formerly wealthy, white Connecticut family ripped apart by the unsolved murder of their matriarch, the investigative work is much more personal. It’s much rarer for these series to look deeply into the matrix of interactions and institutions that make violence almost inevitable.
Yet so much of the true-crime content we consume is still undergirded by an unquestioning deference toward the criminal justice system, imagining that arrests and prosecutions can restore order to broken families and neighborhoods. These podcasts and television series tend to look frankly and forensically at the grimmest of killings, indulging the lowest of our curiosities with elevated pitches.
Like more polished versions of the Dateline episodes beloved by moms the world over, Serial, The Jinx, O.J.: Made In America, and their kin have made morbidity an acceptable part of our daily lives. For the past five years, we’ve been in the midst of a true-crime boom that shows no signs of abating.
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