Witches of Essex; Murdaugh: Death in the Family

“The programme gestures at the context and deeper motivations behind the history of women being accused of witchcraft but, despite its generous runtime, remains frustratingly superficial. It treats the audience like it treats Rylan within the show: as if we are incapable of joining dots, of understanding the mindset of past generations, who believed in magic like they believed in religion and didn’t always make a distinction between the two.”
Lucy Mangan, The Guardian

“What saved this programme were the talking heads, academics who gave this story context and power. The history professor Ronald Hutton, as erudite as his attire was flamboyant, reminded us that up to 90 per cent of those accused in England were women and usually scapegoats in neighbourly disputes… It made for a poignant and striking story of state-sanctioned violence and misogyny that could have done without the cheap gags.”
Ben Dowell, The Times

“Witches Of Essex saw Rylan schooling Professor Alice Roberts in Tudor history. If he’d stuck to playing the bright, brash amateur, splashing a bit of sauce on proceedings, the pairing might have worked. But to see him lecturing her on facts and dates was just odd. The format could have been much better if an acknowledged Tudor historian such as Kate Williams or Lucy Worsley had led the investigation, explaining the nuances of witch-hunts to Alice — who is an osteo-archaeologist and anatomist by training, more experienced with examining ancient bones than documents from Shakespearean England.”
Christopher Stevens, Daily Mail

“The Murdaughs are atrocious in so many different ways, it’s difficult to maintain a useful understanding of all of them at once. However well made and performed Death in the Family is, it prompts the same question as so much other true-crime telly: why am I making myself watch?”
Jack Seale, The Guardian

“Erin Lee Carr and Michael D Fuller’s scripts power-hose rather than drip-feed the darkness behind the rye-sippin’ bonhomie and this show’s ever-present mellifluous thrum of country music. It feels as if they are making the assumption that we are familiar with most of the details of the real story’s bloody and bitter conclusion, which was widely covered in the US media. It would have been a much more effective drama for British audiences if they hadn’t. Still, the performances are superb.”
Ben Dowell, The Times

“Death in the Family is solidly but uninspiringly made, staying true to the hallmarks of prestige true crime. It goes some way to probing how the family use their power, influence and money to try to make this inconvenient problem go away; God forbid a young woman’s death put a dampener on their tearaway son’s bright future. But it also feels weighed down by exposition, and by a sprawling cast of characters that seem to pop up and then disappear; frankly, it’s near-impossible to keep track of which Murdaugh is which after a while.”
Katie Rosseinsky, The Independent