“An Opportunity to Look at How True-Crime Storytelling Can Affect Reality”: Marc Smerling on Reinvestigating Errol Morris’s Reinvestigation in A Wilderness of Error

Marc Smerling’s true crime docuseries for FX, A Wilderness of Error, debuting September 25, is a deep-dive reinvestigation of the case of convicted murderer Jeffrey MacDonald, who has spent the past nearly four decades serving time for the 1970 killing of his wife and two young daughters – a gruesome triple homicide that the onetime Army surgeon and Green Beret blamed (and still blames) on Manson Family copycats. The five-part series is based on Errol Morris’s non-fiction book A Wilderness of Error: The Trials of Jeffrey MacDonald, a deep-dive reinvestigation of the case – specifically the case laid out by both prosecutors and the famed journo Joe McGinniss in his own 1983 book Fatal Vision. Which in turn was made into a two-part TV miniseries. And if your head is spinning, buckle up. Smerling – one of the prolific forces behind Capturing the Friedmans, The Jinx and the Crimetown podcasts – has crafted one rabbit hole of a ride. (Along with an accompanying eight-episode podcast, Morally Indefensible, available now, which follows the McGinniss angle and questions whether the journalist ultimately got too unethically close to his subject.)

To read my interview with the prolific, Emmy Award-winning and Academy Award-nominated producer/writer/director/DP visit Filmmaker magazine.