The Best Docuseries of 2020 was Murder on Middle Beach.

Meghan Gunn
3 min readJan 3, 2021

No spoilers here, just vibes

Hamburg, HBO

Twenty-nine year old Madison Hamburg is the series’ director, documenting his own investigation of his mother’s gruesome murder in an affluent Connecticut suburb. She was killed when he was 18. The murder went unsolved.

This is exactly the kind of thing I wouldn’t watch over the holiday, when I prefer to melt my brain with Parks & Rec reruns. Real life’s been dark enough already that I basically abandoned the true crime scene this year, with the exception of reading Stay Sexy and Don’t Get Murdered (Karen and Georgia, ily). This is all to say that it took a very convincing and trusted television source to get me to log into someone else’s HBO and watch a wack crime story. But then I imbibed all four parts in one sitting.

It started as a college class film project, Madison’s personal quest to understand what happened and absolve his family members (hence interview subjects saying things like ‘hope you get a good grade!’). He didn’t finish, but his professor gave him an A with the condition that he keep working on it. He did, then pitched his work to several outlets. He had no success landing it until one of his very last attempts: HBO.

The whole process took eight years. One of the most fascinating and inspiring threads of the series is watching…

--

--