from Decider.com
https://decider.com/2020/11/15/murder-on-middle-beach-hbo-review-2/
Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Murder On Middle Beach’ On HBO, An Extremely Personal Docuseries Where A Filmmaker Tries To Figure Out Why His Mother Was Murdered
On March 3, 2010, Barbara Hamburg was found outside her house on Middle Beach Road in Madison, Connecticut, with 18 stab wounds in her head and elsewhere on her body; she was declared dead at the scene. Her son, Madison, was 18 at the time of the murder, and we see him three years later, calling his father Jeffrey to see if he can talk for a movie he’s making about the murder as a school project. This begins Murder On Middle Beach, a deeply personal journey by Madison Hamburg to find out why someone would want to kill his mother.
MURDER ON MIDDLE BEACH: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
Opening Shot: We see home video of the filmmaker, Madison Hamburg, as a baby, playing with his mother, Barbara Beach Hamburg.
The Gist: What we find out in Episode 1 is that, despite all the home movies where the Hamburgs are doing fun family things like vacations and parties and other activities, things were not all well with them. Barbara enjoyed the lifestyle she lived after marrying Jeffrey, who was the CEO of Southern Electric, but when their two kids were teens, their marriage soured and Barbara filed for divorce. Stung by the divorce, he refused to pay her alimony and child support, and she was found by her sister Conway on the same day that she was going to ask the court to toss Jeffrey in jail for being a deadbeat dad.
Did Jeffrey have the money? If not, where did it go? He won a wrongful termination lawsuit from Southern Electric that got him a few million dollars, but it seems he also was doing deals that were inappropriate at best, illegal at worst.
As the episode goes along, and Jeffrey talks to his grandmother, aunt Conway, and other relatives and friends of his mother’s, he tries to find out what secrets she had. A few years go by, and the Madison police, embroiled in a corruption scandal, don’t charge anyone with the murder, despite the fact that Jeffrey was one of the primary people of interest in the case. In a surreptitiously-filmed dinner with his father, Madison hears his father say over and over that his mother had secrets, but he seemed to talk more about himself than anything. Madison gets enough courage to ask his father if he had anything to do with it, and his father says no. Later, Jeffrey calls Madison and drops a bomb about Barbara that sends Madison off on in a new direction in his investigation.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Murder On Middle Beach has the feeling of Capturing The Friedmans, where a filmmaker starts finding out horrible and unexpected things about his family while investigating a traumatic event that happened to his parents.
Our Take: One of the reasons why Friedmans worked was because all of what the filmmaker found out was shown in less than two hours. Murder On Middle Beach is a 4-hour docuseries, and it feels stretched a bit thin for that length.
Sure, Madison Hamburg is going on a twisty journey, where he has to figure out if it’s worth digging deeper into his family’s secrets and the secrets that rifled around the small, seemingly bucolic suburb of Madison. But it’s something that feels like it could be told in 2 hours instead of 4. There’s lots of navel gazing, lots of interview pieces that repeat themselves, and way, way more of Madison than we’re really interested in seeing.
We’re fascinated in the directions this story is going in, and the fact that the Hamburgs didn’t live the life that is depicted in family photos and videos. We know that experience well, where just because to the outside world you looked like a happy nuclear family doesn’t mean that’s what was going on in private. Dissecting this underlying mystery will be what drives the series.
But it also feels like we’re going to see Madison go through a lot of talky introspection, along the lines of what he told his producer buddy when he came back from that dinner with his dad: “That’s the first time we’ve ever had a beer together.” Sure, that sounds depressingly fascinating on the surface, but doesn’t really have much to do with the case at hand.
We know that Jeffrey Hamburg has narcissistic and even sociopathic tendencies, and it’s really interesting to see them play out during the process of Madison’s investigation; it’s also fascinating to see his grandmother and aunt come to the conclusion that Jeffrey had something to do with Barbara’s murder. The fact that both Jeffrey and Madison were involved in some untoward behavior — the bomb Jeffrey drops is the fact that Barbara was involved in a pyramid scheme called “Gifting Tables” — should far outweigh seeing Madison’s ruminating.
Why? Because he was never close with his dad, and he was close to his mom but had no idea what she was into. The news he gets will likely devastate him, which will be hard to watch. But the specifics of his parents’ lives and how Barbara came to her fate will be what we’re really looking to find out.
Parting Shot: After finding out about his mom’s involvement in the gifting tables scandal, we see an updated interview with Conway Beach where she says, “You never know” who might have done it, a definite change from her view a few years prior. Then we flash through all the people Madison has interviewed to this point.
Sleeper Star: As much as you want to just mutter the word “asshole” under your breath when you hear from Jeffrey Hamburg, he’s the glue that holds this docuseries together, even if you don’t see him interviewed on camera, at least in Episode 1.
Most Pilot-y Line: Not a fault of Madison’s, but the fact that he has the same name as the town his mother lived in, her family’s last name is Beach, and the fact that she was murdered on Middle Beach Road, makes things narratively muddled, at least a little bit.
Our Call: STREAM IT. Even though it moves a bit slow, and it’s a bit navel-gazy, the family and town dynamics at play in Murder On Middle Beach will keep us watching, even if we wish the series was a bit faster-paced.
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